Creative Writing: All of the short stories I wrote in my senior year of college

Prompt 16: The Louvre Is Too Big

"Prompt:
Take one of your ideas from the last assignment and write a short story about it."

It was a rather hot, sunny day in July, and the Paris streets were steaming under our feet. We stumbled out of the cramped cab, the sweet, familiar melody of "It's A Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys radiating from the shoddy radio speakers the driver had turned on... that would stay stuck in my head all day. I'll tell you what was a sin; getting into a cab that was already cramped without us in it. What was the deal with that? Who thought that was a good idea? Probably dad. He always had those types of ideas. He also thought it was a good idea to bring us to the Louvre... the world's biggest museum with way too many exhibits.

Upon getting into the world's biggest museum or something, we already knew it wasn't going to be a trip for one day. It didn't take long for my father, who we called Bill for reasons I don't care to explain, to run off to some random part of the museum with my step mum because they had different tastes than us, leaving my brother and me to fight for ourselves in a foreign country. I had never taken a French class, and while my brother had, he only could read French, and barely understood the spoken word. Poor boy. Wait, no. Poor us! Okay, no. We were fine. We'd find our way through this baguette-scented, red-wine-stained hell whether we wanted to or not. The museum tour guides in the Louvre spoke English, right? They had to, it was such a giant tourist attraction! Well... the answer was no. What? Seriously? Okay, we could do this. We were fine. We just had to keep telling ourselves that. Just go find a map, or, wait. I picked one up earlier when we first got there. I pulled it out... it was in French. Stupid over here grabbed the first one she saw, not even realising that they had them in different languages. While there were pictograms of the different exhibits, it wasn't really that easy to figure out where we were when the pictograms weren't actually photographs, just crudely made drawings.

Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic...

What floor are we on?

After running up and down the stairs and the halls like a cheesy Scooby-Doo montage, Hunter finally attempted asking a tour guide where the hell we were. In response, we were told to go to the end of the hall and turn to the left to get to a staircase that would lead us downstairs, but when we followed the directions, no joke, there was an out of order sign chained across the stairs. What?! How the hell?! How can you have an out of order sign on a staircase? Oh, no, these stairs aren't feeling it today. Try again tomorrow. What? That doesn't make any sense. And the next set of directions we were given literally led us to a wall, again, with an out of order sign taped to it. The wall, now? You've gotta be kidding us. Eventually we did find our way to the lobby but it took about three hours of aimless walking and worrying if we'd ever get back to America to see our dogs again.

Remind me to grab a map in English next time.