Recette Fondue (3/18: Paris)

Michel and I don’t get up until around 1 in the afternoon. Given that we went to bed at 8am (we stayed up talking for another hour or so), I think this was fairly impressive on our part. So, shower/clean-up, and Michel’s mom and step-dad have prepared a full on lunch for us. Start with some shrimp, and sliced bread with pate-de-thon (tuna salad, but way way better) or a tapenade type spread (also very good) – all accompanied with some champagne. Then we move to the dining table, where they have prepared a thinly sliced veal with garlic, and the scariest (in a good way) mashed potatoes ever. I forget what the dish is called, but basically they mash up potatoes, and then melt in tomette (cheese) until the potatoes take on a dough like consistency. Of course, everything tastes phenomenal. After that they bring out 5 different cheeses, and finally dessert (crème caramel). Awesome lunch.

After lunch, mess around for a bit, and then get ready to go out. Michel is going to a dinner party that Roman is hosting, and I have plans to go hang out with Pimous. So, head out by Metro to the Champs Elysee with two goals: top-up my cell phone, and buy some champagne to bring to Pimous’s. Since it’s Sunday, virtually everything is closed, so I have to go to the super touristy store right near the Arc de Triomphe to get alcohol. I’m sure I got ripped off, but whatever… gotta have champagne.

Finally get to Pimous’s metro stop around 8, we stop into a little café for a drink (he runs into a some friends and gets roped into playing for yet another team in an upcoming rugby tournament), and then we stop to pick up dinner before heading back to his place to meet up with his girlfriend (Maia) and her brother (JoJo). Where do we pick up dinner? MacDonalds! And it is better here! In addition to everything on our menu, they also have a bacon-quarterpounder, the choice of two different types of fries, a MacDonaldsized Croque Mounsieur, they serve beer, and have a weekly special that blends a burger with something French. For example, the “Recette Fondue Burger”, which is basically a quarter pounder with a foundue type cheese instead of the regular cheese. Other specials were the “Recette Tartiflette” (burger with a hashed brown and a French cheese stacked in), and the “Recette Raclette” which has Racelette cheese and cornichons stacked in. Of course, I got the Recette Fondue. It was different, but about as bad as you’d expect anything from McDonalds to be. Anyway, get back to Pimous’s place, put a bottle of champagne in the fridge, and start eating our McDonalds and drinking wine.

Hang out there for a bit, drink the bottle of champagne, play with JoJo’s dog, and reflect on the week Pimous and I had just spent in Les Arcs. When the subject of France’s behavior comes up, JoJo agrees with me that she’s just a bitch. Ha! Validation!

Around 10ish I head back to Michel’s place (Pimous has to be up early to go out of town), watch the end of a movie with Michel’s mom, and hit the sack by 11.

Don’t French People Sweat? (3/17: Les Arcs to Paris)

Wake up in the morning, and frantically get all of our packing done. By 10am, we have all of our stuff outside of the room. Michel needs to wander around the village a bit to retrieve the case for his glasses, Pimous needs to head into the village to finish checking out, and the girls show up. What the hell?! I though I was done with them! Why are we still hanging out with them? Anyway, get the car loaded up, head back to the village for coffee and coke (for the frenchies), and an OJ for me. They seem to think it’s funny that I’m drinking orange juice in the morning after a night of drinking (even though I don’t get hangovers), I’m laughing at the fact that French people can’t seem to go an hour without drinking coffee – and that they think Coke is a good “morning after” drink.

Finally hit the road, and about 20 minutes later have to stop so Michel can throw up some more (he really is a delicate little flower). Continue on for a bit, and then hit traffic. And I don’t mean the heading home from Tahoe at 30mph traffic, I mean dead stop, turn of the engine traffic. I fall asleep, and wake up to find us (finally) moving again. We get out of the mountains, and then Pimous and I switch driving duties. Unfortunately, since any tickets I get in his car will first find their way to his company – getting him in a bit of trouble – I have to actually obey the speed limits. Oh well. Pimous sleeps, I drive, eventually we switch back, and eventually he drops us off at home.

Now Michel and I have about 30 minutes to get showered and dressed to go back out to meet up with Roman (Michel’s best friend) and Lauren (an American living in Paris, and friend of a coworker of Michel’s). Head out, and go to the restaurant L’Arome in the 8th. The food is good, but this is clearly a trendy restaurant. Whatever. I’m just relieved after a week of full on French to finally have a native English speaker – an American! – to talk to. I start the night by making half-assed attempts at speaking French, but by the time dinner is done, Michel and Roman are having their own conversation in French, and Lauren and I are just speaking to each other English.

From the restaurant, we head over to a bar (forget the name… Michel/Lauren/Pimous, any of you remember?). Most of the people there are the same people I’d met briefly the previous Friday night before we all left for Les Arcs. Lauren and I sit together and keep talking. Roman is kind of standing around aimlessly, so Lauren invites him to join us, and the three of us talk for a bit. I notice that pretty much every time Roman says a word, he pretty much leans right into Lauren’s lap (and I later found out that he was rubbing his leg up against hers the whole time), so I get up to get a drink to give them a bit of – ahem – privacy. No more than few minutes go by, before Lauren and Roman are suddenly at the bar with me. Oh well, guess whatever Roman said/tried didn’t work (Roman is pretty well known in the group as one of those guys who can pretty much get any girl he wants).

Eventually, a couple of us decide to go dancing, except we have no idea where to go… technically it’s still too early to go out to the clubs (it isn’t quite midnight yet), and Lauren doesn’t know the Paris nightlife scene well enough to know where to go. Turns out there’s a dance floor right downstairs, which is awesome since they’ve been playing *great* American music all night at the bar. So, we head downstairs, and rock out to AC/DC, Survivor, Michael Jackson, etc. All of it in the previously referenced category of good old, normal, sing along (badly) at the top of your lungs music. A couple downsides: 1) The DJ is about as talented as I am, and mixes in and out of each song the exact same way. 2) It’s hot as hell down here. Now, I’m a pretty sweaty guy to begin with, but this was just outrageous. After about 30 minutes, I’m soaking wet. Seriously. Soaking wet. I’ve taken off my blazer, rolled up my shirt sleeves, and unbuttoned my shirt as much as I can with out scaring everyone away, and my shirt is completely soaked through and I’m dripping sweat. Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by all of these French people wearing jackets, sweaters, etc. What the hell? Don’t these people sweat? The only upside is that I’m so completely soaked that when I move through the crowd, all I have to do is say “you really don’t want to touch me”, people kind of look at the state I’m in, and promptly get out of my way… so at least I have ease of movement.

So, dance there, and finally around 2am, we go outside to go to another club. I’m still soaking wet, so of course I’m now I’m also freezing cold. We walk about 20 minutes over to La Planche (and either my shirt miraculously dried during the walk, or all the sweat just froze… I’m still not sure), a club that all of these guys used to go to when they were in business school together, and it looks like the age of the crowd hasn’t changed a bit. It’s basically all a bunch of college aged kids, with the occasional 40-something dude prowling on the outskirts. Even better, turns out at that the local student supports for the UMP party are having a party at the club tonight, and are all wearing stickers and/or shirts saying “J’Kiffe Sarko” (I love Sarko). Sarko is the name of the candidate – and, for the us, this would roughly be the equivalent of wandering into a nightclub and finding out it was “I love George W Bush” night and the place was packed with all the members of the local Young Republicans. Mimi thought this was one of the funniest things he’d seen in a long time, and set out on two missions: 1) to get me into a political argument with one of them (they all passed… none wanted to deal with an English speaker), and 2) to get one of the “J’Kiffe Sarko” stickers. None of the guys would give hime one, so instead he convinced Lauren to go flirt with one of them and to get his sticker. We hang out there drinking, dancing, and other foolishness until about 5. From there, we head to a Brasserie on the Champs Elysee. Food, more wine, and finally time to go home at 7.

Sorry!

Hey Everyone, sorry for the complete lack of blogging over the last couple weeks. Working on some updates now, and will hopefully have stuff up shortly. I'm safe, I'm sound, life is good -- NOT looking forward to leaving this Sunday.

Short version: Got back to Paris, met some super cool people and had a great time, decided to blow off Budapest/Prague/Krakow and have been in Paris ever since.

Long version: Working on it :-)

later!

Ski Days (3/13-16 Les Arcs)

Thought about doing separate entries for each day, but that would have just bored everyone to tears: every day is pretty much the same. Here's the basic outline: Wake up somewhere between 9 and 11, have a pain au chocolate or croissant, and be on the slopes within an hour. Ski for 4 to 5 hours, then meet up with Michel for lunch (he's not skiing because of his accident... poor baby), go back to the apartment, clean-up/nap/errands, dinner around 8, head out to the bar and/or bowling around 10, to the club around midnight, home anywhere between 4 and 6 – possibly having inhaled a Kebab sandwich along the way. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So, instead, some highlights/lowlights of the last couple days:

* Bizarre as this may sound, I'm having way less fun when the girls are around. When it's just the 3 or 4 of us, the guys are conscious of my deficiency in french, and make an effort to speak slower, or to explain things to me in English if it's clear I'm not following. It's great, and I have a lot of fun when it's just us hanging out. However, when the girls show up, it all changes: the french speeds up, the number of times anyone will stop to explain something to me goes down, I’m not really part of the conversation, and I'm not sure France is even aware I exist. Even worse, they are always around: we meet up with them after breakfast, we ski with them, we have lunch with them, we have dinner with them, and they party with us. However, I guess they don’t feel like they are enough a part of the group to feel like they need to include me (or, maybe they don’t consider me a part of the group). Either way, not enjoying the “there are girls in the group” experience. With regards to France, Michel and Pimous insist that everything I’m experiencing is “cultural differences”. I think she’s just a bitch.

* That said, France and I do share one funny moment. On Thursday, when Pimous, Stephanie, France and I are skiing, I decide I’m going to make my own fun. So, every chance I get I start a race with the other 3, pick up snow balls to throw at Pimous (which ends up leading to a full on tackling each other in the snow episode… Pimous won), and snow spray someone whenever we stop to regroup. After one of these, France says something to me in French, and I snap right back in French. She says, in *perfect* English “Oh, so you can understand and speak French when you want to.” I start laughing and say back “And you can speak English just fine when you want to.” She laughs, I laugh, but also further proof she’s a bitch.

* Pierre/Pimous is awesome. There could have been no snow, and he would have made the trip to Les Arcs worth it for me. I don’t know how else to put it, but I feel like I’ve made a real friend here, and that’s really more than I could have ever asked for out of a trip like this.

* Skiing in Europe is so much better than in the US. I’ve been consciously avoiding talking about the fact that it dumped something like 8’ of snow in Tahoe pretty much the day I left for Europe until I got a chance to do some skiing here, and temper my bitterness over the whole thing. It’s better here because the runs are so much longer, it’s better here because you can get hot wine and beer right on the mountain, it’s better here because I’m using rented skis and don’t have to care how badly I thrash them, and it’s better here because the après-ski/nightlife is better than anything I’ve seen in Tahoe/Vail/Killington (though, not as good as Zermatt or St. Anton… more on that later).

* Lots of people here wear hats/jackets/etc. for US sports teams… especially the Yankees. I know that for them, they are just for fashion (much like my Barcelona sweatshirt), and at the most means that they’ve spent a few days in New York (more likely, they bought it at H&M and have never left France), but I still find myself muttering “Yankees suck” whenever I pass one of them, and a little bit hoping one of them really is a Yankee fan if for no other reason than I’ll have something/someone to talk about something “American”. Though, after the hundredth guy I see, I pretty much have to restrain myself from punching them in the face. Anyway, I think next time I come to Europe I’m bringing a bag full of Red Sox hats and doing my own little exchange program.

* Les Arcs has been different from my other ski trips over here. Previously, I’ve been to Zermatt (Switzerland) and St. Anton (Austria). While this doesn’t make me an expert or anything, I do feel at least qualified to comment on the differences between these three, and Les Arcs feels different. I think the biggest difference has to be that this time instead of being with a group of equally fish-out-of-water Aussies, I’m with a group of locals. It also feels like people here aren’t as friendly, but, again, that’s probably because I’m with French people and going to places that are more French, where as with the Aussies we would have sought out places that were more English (or, at least, more Anglophone). I think this is where I’m encountering the real cultural differences between the French and Americans. I want to say that the French are xenophobes who hate/look down on anyone who isn’t French, but that is in some ways too simple, in some ways giving the French too much credit, and in others not enough. It’s complicated. I don’t think I can get into this here without either using more space than blogger will allow and/or getting something wrong. I’ll probably devote an entire entry to this when I get back to the US, and I’ll probably have to get Michel to help me write it.

* When Michel wrote about the little “fight” he had with his friends with the bread, water, etc., he failed to mention that the three of them basically ended up anywhere from half-naked to naked. The only wardrobe change I made was to put a horrified look on my face. Oh, and French bread hurts. At some point it became Michel and I against Pimous and Nicolas. I got hit in the shoulder with a piece of bread, and it drew blood. I’m not kidding. In the morning, we all had a wound of some sort from the bread.

* Thursday night we went to an English bar. It was jukebox night, and in the span of half an hour I heard Toto, Bon Jovi, Oasis, Journey, and The Hooters. After a week of nothing but house music (and, especially “Love Generation”), it was sooooooo nice to hear good old, normal, sing along (badly) at the top of your lungs music. I loved it. France, Pimous and Michel seemed… ambivalent.

* Friday night, Michel and I get home late. Michel doesn’t want to be completely useless the next day (when we have to drive back), so, after calling his girlfriend back in SF, he goes into the bathroom to make himself throw up. His phone rings. “Mimi, your phone is ringing.” “Answer it.” “Ummm… hi.. this is Michel’s phone… Irina? Yeah… Michel isn’t really available right now.” “Tell him I give him another kiss.” “You sure about that?” Well, made me laugh.

Mimi’s Big Day (3/12: Les Arcs)

Note: for this entry, we have a special guest writer, Michel Decoux. For those of you who don’t know him, Michel is one of my good friends in San Francisco. He’s from Paris (only been in the US for two years), and this whole ski trip was conceived and setup by him and his friends. I’m just along for the ride. Oh, and one of his many nicknames is “Mimi”, so any references over the last couple days to a Mimi, are to him. Enjoy!

Well, how am I supposed to start that… Maybe just start with the day to day stuff, Nicolas wakes up first after hiding in his bed for one hour hoping someone else would go and pick up bread and croissant… In a superb effort he finally went down without forgetting to let us know how courageous he was… It’s around 11am, checking my cell, only one text from the girls of last night basically telling us that we are little girl not being on the slopes before 12. It’s again an awesome day, the clouds are hiding from us, and we finally make it to the highest spot of the resort… Maneesh looks upset, and he is very quiet. After asking him 4 times what was going on, he finally admit that he had a hard time with those skies which are more responsive and technical than the one he has back in California. I don’t know what you think about that excuse, but I always tried to find stupid explanations when I’m just having a hard time… ;) The snow up there is marvelous, my skis are the greatest I ever had, all the ingredients to the recipe of the perfect day. 3 hours skiing before *crash*, and I just decide that I would spend the rest of my week with only one of my knees. Getting back to the room while they are having hot wine with cute girls, go to medical center while they are resting, put skies back while they are in the shower, go to the physical therapist while they are starting the aperitif, greatest day in my life… But I’m fine I just twisted my knee, won’t need any surgery.

Pimous is cooking, Oups, I don’t know if I introduced you to my friends. Maybe Maneesh did, but I’ll do it again… We all gave nicknames to people back in my business school, Pierre is Pimous which is also a candy back in France which slogan is “small but strong!”. He is actually 100 kilos… You also have Nico for Nicolas, not as crazy as he is from his 2 meters height. And myself, Meru (Michou with a Spanish accent) it’s also a big and ugly fish in French, and I’m about average in weight and height…

So! Pimous is cooking some kind of Spanish stuffed omelet, not as good as it sounds actually… Getting diner, I’m sneaking to the Ipod to play “Love Generation”, they start to be a bit angry at me about that… C’mon guys, that s the anthem of the week!

Getting ready to go out, Maneesh shows up nicely dressed and Nicolas yelled at him a “Bogus” when he saw him… Maneesh looks upset, lol, I couldn’t stop laughing. “Bogus” in French stands for “Beau Gosse” and basically means, “hot guy”… I love those misunderstanding, that’s just making my days, here… He still doesn’t really like when we are calling him like that… There are many other words that can lead to misunderstanding, “douche” stands for “shower”, “bonheur” for “happiness” and plenty of other examples…

French are very “in your face”, they rarely adopt cheesy Marina behaviors, you will never ear a French girl say five times “It’s the greatest thing I ever seen” and three “Oh! My God!” in a 10 minutes row, they are very direct, they will say what they truly think and if they like you they will probably make fun of you AND themselves, and be very sarcastic about you in front of you, because they just want to have a good laugh with you. If they don’t like you then they won’t just talk to you. I feel like Maneesh is asking himself, hum, do they like me? So why are they making fun of me like that? The thing is everybody is doing that to everybody, and we are expecting Maneesh to do the same… It’s coming slowly… Don’t worry Maneesh!

We went to the Ambiente, again, got a bottle of champagne, again, but we are not having that much fun there, Nicolas is in love, again, with the barmaid and trying to do anything to catch her attention. The music is loud, there are only guys in the bar, it s pretty depressing… We need to make this night better for Maneesh’s blog, he can’t just say, we went home and slept… We decided to go bowling. I think the image of this sport is about the same in the US. Anyway, this looks like to be a five-stars bowling with average speed of your bowl, digital animation and the equipments look pretty new. Getting shoes and bowls before starting, Maneesh is probably using his engineer background to get the best of his bowl (btw, his score made me think about the quality of his program). Pimous is just an elephant that is launching a rocket on those poor pins, and Nicolas is sad because he is still in love with the barmaid, and thinks that this state of mind will strongly affect his bowling skills. I have shoes on, but with my knee I don’t expect to be the best that night. We did 2 games, and we will recall that the injured guy won the first game with an average speed below 16km/h while the elephant is around 27, that Maneesh loves doing a one pin shot right after a spare or a strike, that girls is the weakness of Nicolas. Maneesh wants his revenge tonight, I expect him not to go skiing just to be ready for tonight’s games.

Back in the Ambiante negotiating a shot of vodka as the bar was already closed, went to the apocalypse again, Nicolas felt, surprisingly, in love with the stripper that looked at him 3 times [Maneesh’s note: this is one the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. The club, a regular, plain old night club, has a stripper that works for them, and guys pay to get lap dances out in the open in the middle of the club. It seems like a great idea, but it’s a little awkward to try to talk to anyone, when you both know there’s a naked woman 10 feet away.]… and finally get back home at 4, nothing crazy happened, it was just a quiet clubbing night, when, I don’t really remember if it was because I played, again, Love Generation or because Nicolas was upset about not getting the stripper back to the room, but we started a little fight launching pieces of old breads, beer caps, whip each others with aluminum foil, splash water on dressed guys and horsing around. Nobody got hurt, and we really had a good laugh.

Thanks for reading me… Sorry for the grammar mistakes and excuse my French ;)

Love Generation (3/11: Les Arcs)

Mimi won’t stop playing this song. “Love Generation” by Bob Sinclair. I wake up to it, we have breakfast to it, he sings it all day while we’re on the slopes, he plays it while we’re cleaning up after skiing, and he requests it at the club. It’s reached the point where, much like back home some friends will randomly say “who’s country is this?” and we sing back “this is ouuuuur country”*, we’ve taken to randomly saying “what generation is this?” and then we’ll either sing back “beeee the love generation”, or whistle the melody. People look at us funny.

Actually, we get lots of funny looks. There are lots of French people here, there are lots of English people here, but nary do the twain cross. The fact that my obviously French friends have this random brown person who speaks bad French and has an American accent following them around draws some funny looks. On the upside, I get some automatic credibility from being with them, so more people are willing to let me struggle through my French, and not automatically switch over to English (or ignore me all together!).

Anyway, we’re up and out around 10 and hit the slopes. Today we’re piddling around on mid-mountain, mostly trying to find our legs, and adjusting to the altitude. I made the mistake of letting Michel help pick my skis. He wants me to become a better skier, so he picks out skis that require good technique. I hate these skis. See, I have no technique. I’ve pretty much declared my self the world’s best bad skier. I can go just about anywhere, I can do just about anything, but lots of people have been alternately horrified by my technique, and amazed I can ski at all. My skis back home are *perfect* for my style. They absorb a lot of shock, and they turn slowly on their own, though I can still force quicker turns when I need to. These skis are the exact opposite. They absorb no shock, and they turn on a dime. I’m not used to this. I lean a little to my left expecting the skis to slowly bank to the left, and instead I’ve turned practically sideways. The only thing these skis are good for is doing moguls. Since they turn so sharply on their own, navigating the gaps is way easier (and less draining) than with my skis. So I guess that’s one thing I’ve going for me. So, we’re skiing. Michel is a really good skier. When he skis, he looks like a professional skier. I feel, and probably look, as wobbly as a newborn cow trying to take his first steps.

Around 2 we stop for lunch, and at the end Michel, Pierre and my self decide that we’re pretty much done for the day, and ski back down to our place, while Nicolas decides to stay and keep snowboarding on his own. Get home, crash for a nap and then get up and get ready for dinner/going out. Michel makes a dinner of spaghetti Bolognese… sort of. While he’s cooking, I have some funny conversations with Pierre and Nicolas about different US compared to Europe type stuff. Also, there’s a song these guys like to play that has a line in the chorus, “C’est le bonheur”, which roughly means “I’m having a good time.” However, “C’est le” literally means “it’s the”, and bonheur, well, it’s pronounced “boner”. I spent about an hour giggling about this. Actually, I’m still giggling about this. After, we head over to Ambiente (again) to meet up with some girls (Stephanie and France…yes, I’ve met a French girl in France who’s name is France) that are friends of Michel’s boss back in the US. We all hang out at the bar until closing time-ish, and then head over to Apokolypse (noticing a trend?). Things get out of hand. I don’t have a clear memory of everything that happened, but the following things I’m pretty certain of:

1. None of us danced in the cage up against the wall.
2. We didn’t gang tackle Nicolas and then drag him around in the snow.
3. And I definitely didn’t drunk dial my parents.

Please ignore any pictures that contradict any of the above statements.

* For anyone who didn’t get the reference, there were a series of Chevy ads that featured the really annoying (and almost nonsensical) song “Our Country” by John “don’t call me Cougar” Mellancamp. These ads were on TV incessantly during football games. So, for over 4 months, anyone who watched football heard 30 second snippets of the song about a thousand times every Sunday. You can see an example here This is ouuuuuuur country.

5 pounds of Cheese! (3/10: Les Arcs 1800, France)

After the rest of our drive, we get to Les Arcs around noon. We can’t check into our room until 5pm, and our ski passes aren’t valid until tomorrow. Nicolas grabs his stuff, buys a day pass, and goes snowboarding – the rest of us wander around for a while, get the lay of the land, have lunch (gallets & cider), after we head to a bar to watch a rugby game (Wales vs. Scotland – part of the Six Nations tournament that I also saw a game of in London). Hang out there until around 4ish, and then we’re able to get into our room and get unpacked, rent our gear, etc. I also finally get start in on my 4th book: "Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism" by George Soros.

For dinner we go to a place Michel has been raving about since before we even got to France. What they do is take a round of a cheese called Tomette, and basically melt the cheese inside the rind, slice of the top, and serve it straight up with bread, meat, etc. So, we get to the restaurant, and they don’t serve it anymore. Michel is disappointed (bordering on upset), but we settle for Raclette, and proceed to eat about 5lbs of cheese. I’m not kidding. Raclette is the name of the cheese, and dinner consists of giant block of the Raclette, some bread, cornichons (small pickles), and plates of meat. I think in the US you'd have to sign a waiver of some sort before they'd be allowed to serve you this meal. The Raclette goes under a burner lengthwise to melt it, and you use a scraper to scrape the melted cheese off and on to your plate. Dinner is just pure, unadulterated cheese.

At some point during dinner, Pierre disappears. I figure he’s just gone out for a cigarette, but turns out he’s sick and has gone home. We’re down to three. After dinner we go to a bar called Ambiente, where Nicolas falls in love with the bartender, Alice, who barely speaks a word or even smiles at any of us. Around 1, we decide we’re done with the bar, and head over to Apokolypse, which is the nightclub in the village. Actually, we get sidetracked. There’s an arcade on the way to the club, and they have a multi-player racing game that none of us able to resist. So, 4 games later (Michel won twice, Nicolas and I once each… but I swear, on the last game – when we were tied at one win each – they teamed up against me just so “the American” wouldn’t win. Bastards.). So, to the club.

At 3, Michel comes over to me and says, “we’re leaving.” I finish talking to some girl, and Michel and Nicolas are nowhere to be found. I’ve been ditched! I head back to the apartment, but I’m locked out. Of the building. Luckily our room door is right next to the building door (on the 3^rd floor), so a combination of phone calls and banging on the outside door gets Pierre to come let me in. However, Michel is the only other person there. Nicolas is still at the club. So, grab keys, and head back to the club. We’re down to two. I get back inside, and find Nicolas sitting on a bar stool, facing a wall, head resting against the wall. He’s fast asleep. I wake him up and suggest going home, but, he wants to stay. Guh. I’m ready to go home. So, we struggle through the last half hour or so (club closes at 4) with some liquid assistance, and then finally head home.

I’m pretty sure we woke Pierre and Michel up (by jumping on their beds) before they were able to corral is into our beds, and down for the night.