Paris Weekend/ Nuit Blanche

First I apologize for the exceedingly long nature of the post. Summary- Paris was crazy but fun and the first day of school was good.


This past weekend I headed to Paris in hopes of participating in "Nuit Blanche" which is a mostly an open air arts festival taking place all night throughout the city. And I mean all night. Many events go from 7pm to 7pm, though not all do. I left Coutances at 8:30 am on the train, arriving back at Gare St Lazare less than a week later. I got there around 12:30 and set out on my quest. Since I am here in France for 7 months and in a rather cold area at that, I figured it would be a worthwhile investment to buy a hairdryer and straightener. I had written down direction of how to get to Carrefour, a large target/ Meijer type grocery store. While it was a good 2- 2.5 miles away, I had all the time in the world to get there. I was to meet Julie at her place at 6pm, a good time away. So I walked and I walked and I walked, in the process getting asked "Vous etes du quartier?" (You live around here?) but sadly I had no directions to offer, just a Lonely Planet map. I finally arrived at my destination, after walking along Blvd Haussmann and the large department stores there. I turned the corner to see that the large discount department store I had been looking for was just a crappy "Carrefour City" meaning they just had groceries and the like. Rather disappointed I head to better attractions of Paris, including Le Centre Pompidou and Notre Dame.
After admiring Le Centre from the outside (I remembered the inside being rather boring when I went with my parents) I took advantage of the free admission to Notre Dame and sat and admired the interior from a chair for a while.



Afterward I ambled along the Seine making way toward Julie's place where I would be staying, through "Jardin des Tuileries" and eventually jumping on the Metro line.


Julie studied abroad in Kalamazoo my junior and when she heard I was in France, kindly offered to let me come stay with her in Paris sometime. As my attempts at couchsurfing for the weekend fell through, I took her up on the offer. We headed to a HUGE mall, where we got groceries, wine, and the hairdryer and straightener I had been hoping for all day.
Dinner didn't get started until 9pm and we didn't leave the house for Nuit Blanche until 11pm (with all her housemates and visiting friends). This post is getting too long already, so! we went out saw some of Nuit Blanche and then tried to find a club. That part of the night wasn't too successful, and come to think of it the next part wasn't either. So started heading home. Unfortunately Paris organization deemed that on a night when everyone would be out, to dramatically cut subway and bus services. After trying to get taxi for 30 minutes Julie and I headed to one night bus that would get us about halfway home. The bus was completely packed, but we squished ourselves on all the same and hoped for the best. We got out at the Champs-Elysee with about 1h15 left to walk. We walked for 30 minuted before we reached a point where we could actually find empty taxis. Julie and I hopped in the taxi and were able to rest our feet for a 10 minute ride which surely would have taken us another 45 to walk.
At 4am we were finally back at Julie's. We closed the shutters and fell into bed, not waking up until 1230p the next day.

Once waking up from our dead man's sleep, we had a little breakfast and I headed out, so that I could wander a bit and not have to worry about making my 4pm train.
While walking around I ran into girl scouts/ guides in adorable uniforms selling calendars, which of course I had to buy one! Lateron while reading the calendar in the train station I realized that I had been tricked, and it was really a co-ed version of boy scouts that I had bought from!

You would think by this time in the day I had enough fun with public transportation, but no. There was still more fun in store. I arrived well at my transfer at Lison, but unfortunately my connecting train did not. I'm not sure exactly how, but no train headed to Coutances ever passed through like it was supposed to. Instead I had the pleasure of waiting at the Lison train station for 1h15 until the next available train came through. This brought be into rainy (0f course) Coutances at 8:40 rather than the 7:20 I had been hoping for. I walked home, still happy though, it had been a good weekend. I opened the school gates to let myself in and headed over to my building. Slight terror came when I tried to open the usually unlocked door and it wouldn't budge. I used my last 30 seconds of credit on my cell-phone to call Huimin, and was luckily able to communicate in French to please get the heck down here now! She let me in and finally was day was near an end.
I only had to make dinner, shower, hand wash some clothes and prepare for my first day of school ;)