Day 16: Troisième Jour à Paris

We went to the Louvre. It was big. We saw everything. Well, we’ll say we did – we went to every section and saw “a representative sample” of each. Soooo much stuff to see. Some of it was awesome; like us. Some of it was stupid; like the hostel we’re staying at......

Top 10 reasons to stay anywhere other than “The 3 Ducks Hostel” in Paris.

10. Headlice – The only reason this isn’t the number 1 problem with the hostel... is that we made it up. There’s no headlice – we just wanted a nice round number of problems.

9. Lockout time – You cannot be in the rooms between midday and 4pm. Hasn’t been a problem for us, but I imagine it could be a real inconvenience in some situations.

8. Number of toilets – Just the two toilets. Between everybody.

7. Breakfast – A bread roll and/or a croissant. Some butter and jam. And orange juice. It’s a pretty piss-poor effort that.

6. Bells – The hostel is across the road from a church whose bells chime on the hour, and sometimes on the half-hour as well.

5. The Friendly Service – The guy(s) at the front desk like to ignore you for as long as they can until you actually go out of your way to get their attention. Usually they are distracted because they’re talking to one or more girls at the bar at the reception desk.

4. The Lack of Organisation – Recall the story about 7 people being booked into our 6 bed room!

3. The Layout – The common area at The 3 Ducks is an outdoor courtyard. A very nice place indeed for people to sit around having some drinks and a chat with the other guests until the wee hours... unless you are a person who is in their room trying to sleep. The rooms are all open directly onto this courtyard. The room doors are quite literally just metres away from where people are sitting and talking at night. And the doors are simple wooden-frames things with glass panes which do nearly nothing to cut out the noise. Along with noise, you also get people’s cigarette smoke wafting into the room.

2. The Key System – There is one key per room. You pick it up if from reception if you need to get into the room, and drop it off if you are the last person to leave. Clearly this relies on everybody doing the right thing. But you know people... in general, they don’t. They do have a spare key per room for when someone runs off with the first one. But what if, like last night, a bunch of people in a room get drunk, and pass out in the room with the door locked and both keys inside? Well, then half the hostel gets woken up by the person who is locked out smashing on the door and yelling in a futile attempt to wake the others up. At 2:30am. For 15 minutes. Eventually someone got in through a window for him.

1. The Showers – Classic stuff. You get in the shower and you get a totally puddle-covered floor (for a reason which will become apparent), and very minimal space to hang stuff up – so inevitably almost everything you want to keep dry gets wet. You get in behind the shower curtain and turn the water on... errr, how do you do that? There’s a few levers around attached to pipes. They do nothing. Hmmm, there’s a little silver knob on the silver pipe here. It doesn’t really look like anything, but maybe it’s ... OH MY GOD, WATER!! It blasts out like a firefighters hose! Full power. It’s quite painful really. This is why the floor is wet – the shower curtain gets blasted outwards, and does nothing to keep the water contained to the shower recess.

Oh, yeah, and the water is cold.

Fortunately it doesn’t last long. 12 seconds in fact. Then you have to press the button again to continue your shower. Fun times. There’s 2 showers on our floor, that open (like the rooms) directly onto the courtyard. And one of them doesn’t lock.

And the light switch is outside the shower room, and is hidden behind where the door is when it's open. And it really only just wide enough to stand in. Really top-notch stuff these showers.

OVERALL
OX Fun Times hostel rating: 1/10
It scores its only point because it doesn't have headlice.