We are still recovering from La Nuit Blanche, which is a night of contemporary art installations and free concerts that go all night long across Paris...a.k.a., an excuse to drink in public!
5 pm-10 pm
The other American assistant Kat and the German assistant Julia and I took the train to Paris in the evening on Saturday, found some dinner (I really do eat liver at any chance I get now), and began to drink as cheaply as possible. This means after we each splurged and had a Leffe Brune (delicious but 5 Euros each), we decided to go to Monoprix and buy bottles of wine. Luckily, Kat had studied abroad for a year in Paris, and thought to bring a corkscrew.
11 pm - 2 am
The streets were packed with thousands of people, all of whom had some form of alcohol with them. We wandered around for awhile then settled in a very tiny densely packed alley outside the Frog and Princess Pub, where we sipped wine and talked for 3 hours.
Our people watching was very entertaining, and we came up with labels for most of the people. GIA = Gay In America, which refers to how stylish the straight men here are. TDH = Tall, Dark and Handsome, TDNSH = Tall, Dark, and Not-So-Handsome, etc. We met a very TDH man who was disappointed to find out our train left in 5 hours, so we did not end up hanging out with him and his friends who left when the bar closed.
2 am - 5 am
We then found a bar that had outside heaters, so we sat drinking outside for 3 hours with our French friends, two older women and and ex-boyfriend of theirs. Apparently I am much better at French when I have been drinking, because we talked almost the entire time and they understood and even complimented my French! Here we all had a wonderful experience with quite possibly the most disgusting bathroom any of us had ever had the misfortune to have to use.
5 am - 5:45 am
From the bar we took a lengthy, staggering walk from the bar all the way to the Metro (being tipsy, we decided a walk would do us good so we should just walk to a Metro stop that was much further away than was necessary). During this walk, I was picking up the rear behind my friends, when while crossing a crosswalk, a drunk man light-heartedly decided to pick me up and carry me for a ways, but because he was walking in the opposite direction and I was behind everyone, it took a moment for my friends to realize I was being swept away. Both the drunk man and I were having a laugh about it, and he set me down only a few feet later. We made it to the Metro and sat down to wait for the first train of the day, a total of 7.5 km walked throughout the night.
5:45 am - 10:30 am
We caught the first Metro train, along with lots of other drunk French people, who were smoking cigarettes on the train and singing Hakuna Matata in French the entire ride, which because we had walked so far, was almost the entire line. We got off at Gare de l'Est, and unfortunately our train was not until 8, and it was only a little after 6 and no food places were open yet. So we sat down on the floor and I slept for half an hour, then the food places opened and we were able to eat a croissant, spill a lot of hot chocolate (not alcohol related, the floors are marble and water had spilled, creating a very slippery surface), and I fell back asleep until 15 minutes before our train left. Kat and Julia slept on the train but I couldn't, and then we had to take a "navette" which is a tiny bouncy bus from the train station into BLD, which, after a night of drinks, is a very nauseating experience. We got home, showered, and went to bed at 10:30 am.
All in all, it was 26 sleepless hours, 12 of them spent drinking and walking, we heard very little music and only made it to a couple of the art installations, but we met lots of people and had a great time. Now we're in Chez MacDo once again, surprisingly not hung over at all!
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