Ushering In 2009 In Paris
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Yeah…. a week late, but here are some updates.
Finally made it to Paris for New Year’s. It’s been on my list of things to do before I die for a while, and I can finally cross it off. Unfortunately, I think I built it up in my head, and it wasn’t able to deliver.
First off, I usually like traveling alone, but for some reason it felt like I should have had company. Theresa was initially supposed to meet me here, but she procrastinated on getting a hostel, and there weren’t any available, so she stayed in Marsielle for New Years.
Then… I initially wanted to go up to Sacre Coure cathedral and get a nice view over the city and watch the fireworks from there, but fog was going to get in the way. I checked weather.com and said PM fog, so I scrapped that idea. No point being up there if I can’t see anything. I decided to go with my second choice of Champ de Mars below the Eiffel Tower.
I wandered around Paris taking in Sacre Couer and Montmatre before taking a nap and venturing out again about 6pm. I walked down Champs de Elysees to see the Arc de Triumph, Place de la Concord, the huge ferris wheel, before heading to Dome des Invaldies and finally the Eiffel Tower. I got there about 9pm, which was a perfect time to get a good spot, before the thousands of people got there. The only problem was staying outside in 20 degrees for 3 hours.
The Eiffel Tower was lit up all blue with 12 gold stars, which made it look like the EU symbol, which I’m sure was the point. Every half hour it would light up with little white lights flashing all over the tower. It was ok. Nice change of view while waiting for the new year. It finally came around, with the gold stars going out, one by one, as a countdown. I was really excited. Couldn’t wait to see all the fireworks. A couple years ago, I had seen a video of a new year celebration where fireworks were shooting out of the bottom two floors and up in the air from the top. The only problem was that there were no fireworks. Anywhere in Paris, well, professional ones anyways. There were some Parisians lighting up their own. All that happened was the same white lights lighting up until the tower gradually went from blue to the normal orangeish light.
Disappointed and cold (I think my body temp was probably 95 degrees), I decided to down the bottle of champagne I had and head back to the hostel. Thankfully the metro was still running and was free for new years.
The other several days were relatively uneventful. I’ve been to Paris before and hit up most of the major sights, so I just spent those days wandering around and trying to find interesting things that are kind of off the beaten path.
The last day (the 2nd), Theresa finally made it to Paris, so we spent the evening checking out the some of the main sights until she got to cold to stay out anymore. Thank god for the buses. It’s pretty hard to cheat the metro in Paris, but thankfully the buses don’t check for passes…
Next stop was Bruges.
mrnational