Our party began at 7 pm on the terrace of one of the hallways at the university. And it ended at 9:30 am as we dragged ourselves home from Montrmartre. Yes, this is math we can all do, that means the party lasted for FOURTEEN HOURS. Hence the epic nature of this post, and a contributing factor to why it's Thursday and I'm still not fully recovered, haha.
Here are Emily and Basia with the fruit they dipped in chocolate:
The team of Italians also made spaghetti carbonara for the group (well, for me they made spaghetti with olive oil and ham, haha). From there we hit the town.The first thing we saw was actually in the courtyard of the ENS, which was a woman walking among a bunch of record players:
I don't know what it means, so don't ask. From there we tried to get to the Luxembourg Gardens to see the GIANT disco ball:
I wish I could give you a better sense of perspective on just how massive it was, but you can sort of tell by the trees in the foreground. There were tons of people, though, so we couldn't get very close. This pic gives an inkling of the crowds (it's about midnight at this point, just to situate the chronology):
From there we went to the Saint Séverin church in the Latin quarter, for what I think turned out to be the coolest installation of the night. There wasn't really anything to photograph for it, but here's a group shot:
The installation was a series of 40 speakers arranged in a big circle. There was a recording of a choir singing an unaccompanied piece (my guess is Bach but they didn't say), and each speaker was playing one of the voices. So it was all recorded individually, then you could stand in the middle of the circle and hear how the sound changed as you walking around. You could go listen to the sopranos (or one specific soprano) and then move to hear more bass, etc. And if you stood in the middle, it was absolutely perfect surround sound. Isn't that awesome? We LOVED it.
From there we went to what was perhaps the disappointment of the night, which was the giant crystals inside Notre Dame:
The crystals were supposed to represent stuff in the church, but it seemed tenuous at best to us. And they weren't even all that cool in the end. But obviously we had to see it.We were a huge group by this point:
From Notre Dame we headed up to the Buttes Chaumont, where there was a series of installations. Our favorites were the field covered in desk lamps (pixar, anyone?):
And the field of umbrellas:
There were also a series of strange neon signs:
We got pathetically lost in the Buttes Chaumont and lost about an hour trying to find each other. We finally got out of there around 4 and headed to the Espace 104, an artist's colony. On the way we found a really awesome installation, a soccer field with bumps!
The idea was that in changing one detail, the rest of the game was also totally thrown off. There were real refs and they were recruiting people to play! We seriously pondered signing up but decided we'd kill ourselves (or our ankles) given how tired we were, haha.
Anyway, once we did all that we decided that we might as well go to Montmartre and watch the sun rise over the city, since it was after 5 anyway. We got to the neighborhood while it was still dark, so we could appreciate how Sacre Coeur just LOOMS over everything:
Anyway, the main problem with this grand idea was that we were a good hour away from sunrise, so we had to kill all sorts of time. But we figured it was still one of those now or never kinds of moments, since we were so close. So we decided to gut it out and wait around. Fortunately Emily's friend Albert lived in the area, so we were able to seek refuge there for a cup of tea while we waited. Anyway, it was totally worth it, the sunrise was pretty amazing, here's a series of 3 pics:
And here's Team Montmartre, the ones who made it all the way to the sunrise!
So yeah, there you have it, that's why I pretty much wanted to die on Sunday and Monday, hahaha. But I wouldn't have had it any other way!
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