Inspiration

We decided to leave Vincent's place because Guillaume was kind enough to offer up his room to us. He is staying with Julia for the weekend which is so generous of him. Vincent was just a little bizarre and Guillaume has a mattress for us. Turns out Guillaume was nicer than we could have imagined or hoped for. We arrived and he had an extra set of keys for us and he'd bought us fresh croissants for this morning and little packaged waffle things for future breakfasts! Amazing!

With our last and FINAL (!!!!) move of the trip done (except for to and from airports), we headed back to the St. Michel area where we were meeting up with Rich. He was waiting for us by the fountain and promptly announced that he was freezing, so we went to a cafe about 10 meters from where we were currently standing. Have I mentioned I love cafes in Paris? Or anywhere really, but in Paris, especially. We spent a couple hours over our petit cafes telling him some of our most ridiculous stories and hearing about his life here in Paris, including his morning at a literary festival, his adventures in shopping trolleys, et le coupe du monde. He moved here from England around 2 years ago and works at a bar and lives the 20-something Parisian life. I have a lot of admiration, I guess is the word, for him making the leap to move here. He's the first person I've met that's actually doing what I've been talking about doing for years, so it was inspiring to hear what that's like.

When Rich left to go back to work (after stubbornly insisting on paying for my too expensive cafe au lait), we wandered around the area, went past the Notre Dame again, found some great street food, high fived some Scottish men in kilts, and got little French flags handed to us. When it started raining we decided to come back to Guillaume's to get some more layers. This stop over ended up being much longer than anticipated, but we were planning out other things to do and Laura was trying to figure out how on earth to cheaply get to CDG for her 8 AM flight. I cannot believe this trip is almost over. What she decided was that she would just go Sunday night on one of the last metros and spend the night in the airport or something. Which means this is our last night together....tear :'(

The weather cleared up and around 930 we headed to the Eiffel Tour to go see it at night and catch its little light show. It's so gorgeous at night. I know I've seen it so many times and I know the rest of the world also thinks it's gorgeous, but still, I think it's just beautiful at night. We found a little shop that was still open, bought a 4.90 euro bottle of wine which was to become our project for the night. The nice men at the shop even opened it for us. We took our seats about 5 minutes before the light show, which really isn't that big of a deal but it's still cool to see. After the light show, we watched some street dancing before jumping on another metro and heading back to Montmarte.

We got to Montmarte around midnight so there was still live music being played and a few people dancing but there weren't as many people as I was hoping. We sat on the steps and could see the Centre Pompidou, the Notre Dame, and the Invalides all lit up. After about 30 seconds, people started talking to us (that's why I love The Steps). I spoke in French for the majority of the night, because the drunk Algerian boys didn't really speak that much English. We found a group of a few Americans who were all studying in Scotland and here visiting. We spent the next hour and a half or so working through our bottle, gazing up at the Sacre Coeur (also stunning at night) and talking with our new friends. Eventually it started to get cold and I started to have to go to the bathroom, and we weren't sure if the metros were still running so we headed home.

We got lucky and the metros WERE still running but when we got out of the station we had no idea what street we were on. We thought it would be a great idea to run down the up escalator and go back through the metro to another exit. When we got to the bottom of the escalator we found that the doors to the metro locked shut (because they were exit doors). Bummer. So we went back up to street level and found our way home.

My brain is tired.


Quotes:
"I've got Paris. Sure, I don't travel much, but I've got Paris! That's all that matters." - Rich