Nuit Blanche

Yesterday I had a full day of traveling around with all the people in my class. This made it difficult to perform my favorite tourist activity: pretending I'm not American. Not only were we traveling around in a pack, our guide person made it a habit to stop in the middle of the Metro stations in order to explain to us, which direction we were going etc. Never in all my life did I think I would be part of a group that had to stop and do a headcount after every train, escalator, and street crossing. Needless to say it was driving me nuts. Our second guide, whose job i was to lead us to the museum, had no idea where we were or where we were going. She would ask multiple people and then announce in English to the rest of the group, that we were indeed getting on the right train. Luckily the lack of food and multiple wine stops were making me increasingly more forgiving. After a full day of group wandering, some people were going to go to bed and I was going to be one of them but I forced myself to go out and see nuit blanche, a full night multiple location art expo which felt a lot like Soho's fashion's night out. I was so glad I went. There were so many young people and so many cool exhibitions. However, because of the amount of people, all the transportation wasn't working properly. After missing the last train at 2, by 15 mins, my friends and I spent 2 hours asking directions from people and wandering around from metro line (shut down because of an accident) to the night buses (all service suspended) to taxi stands (don't even think about trying to get in with 5 people). Eventually we just decided that we weren't going to get home that night. So after a chocolate chip muffin or two we headed for a remake of eyes wide shut. All the actors were played by one tattooed, pierced man with grillz and he was dressed in drag for every role, male and female. It was one of the strangest things that I have ever seen (twice), but the theatre was warm and we had somewhere to sit and sleep. And after all of our strife and wandering. After two showings of the 30 min movie, the metro stop opened up and as soon as we got to the platform, our train was there. Before the third showing would have ended we were home. It was almost too easy. Even though it was no the night I planned for, it certainly was an experience. Here's the link in case you want to check it out. I was in Central the whole time. http://nuitblanche.paris.fr/

More tomorrow and pictures, I promise.
Love,
Violet