While I did manage to snag a reasonably priced apartment in Montmartre for my stay in Paris, I didn’t have the fortune of having furnishings included. I have a lot of trouble spending money on furniture for such a short amount of time. Also, I took the oh-so-enlightened perspective that if I didn’t have much furniture that it would push me out of my room and into the city to explore.

Fun plan, but it kind of sucked not have a chair to sit in.

Karma came to my rescue. Five friends from Georgia Tech were in town for the Tour de France, and they met me outside my apartment on the Sunday of the Tour. I was walking with one of them from the door of my building to the nearby metro stop and he told me, “the other guys are waiting on a sofa at a bus stop.”

“Wait, what?”

“You’ll see,” he replied. Sure enough, there were the other four sitting nonchalantly on a sofa dropped right next to a bus stop. With no hesitation I said,

“Let’s carry this up to my room.” You might be surprised to hear that they accepted without any hesitation. However, you sort of have to understand the mindset of traveling in foreign countries: you get a taste for slightly ridiculous situations. This was definitely one of those.

We hauled the sofa across the street and up the alley to my building’s door. A woman snickered on the way out as we sized up the best way to maneuver the couch up the three flights of twisting, narrow stairs. The process was actually pretty easy until we got to my apartment’s door. We were stumped for a moment until Aaron came to the rescue with some spatial reasoning brilliance to get the unwieldy beast through the frame of my door.

Success.

The only problem left to solve is what to do with it when I move out…