Monday, January 1, 2007

Bonne Année!


So, the other ladies and I have been blessed with the presence of two of our Spanish tracker friends, Jason and JR. For some reason, both of the boys are staying in my room, much to the dismay of Cecile, the lady who runs our residence. This would be fine since Nanda and I bought an air mattress, but JR snores like it’s his job. I can even hear him snoring through my ear plugs. It’s crazy. I tried to kick him out, but there was no hotel to be found and the other girls don’t have big enough rooms for the air mattress. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Anyways, let me tell you about New Year’s in Paris. The day started out innocently enough, we got up, ate breakfast, etc. We planned to meet the Lequires at the Sacre Coeur. However, just as we were about to leave, Jason decided to take a last minute bathroom break at Nanda’s electric toilet. And he broke it. The toilet overflowed and there was no plunger to be found in the entire hotel. I even checked the Turkish toilets and managed to walk in on one of the Africans who was in the middle of doing his business. I found a bucket and Jason sawed off the top of a water bottle and he began emptying the putrid toilet water. I threw up in my mouth just watching it. Nanda and I were given the task of tracking down a plunger (plungoir). We went to every shop that was open and all the hotels in the area and no one had a plunger. Then we tried to take the bus to the Auchan which is kind of like a Walmart, but it turns out the bus doesn’t run on Sundays. We looked for a taxi for thirty minutes and, in a moment of desperation, we joined hands and prayed for a taxi. It was amazing because at that exact moment a taxi miraculously appeared. We finally tracked down a plunger and got back to the residence, only to discover that a plunger doesn’t really work on an electric toilet. After more toilet water emptying and more retching, we finally left to meet the Lequires for a New Year’s Eve dinner.

Dinner was wonderful. We ate a sports tapas bar in Montmartre. I discovered kir which is wine with syrup added to it…yummy! After that, we walked up the one million stairs to the Sacre Coeur to watch the fireworks all over the city. It was beautiful. People were dancing, champagne was flowing, I should have known that the night was literally going to go down hill from there. The metro stopped running to our house, so we took a bunch of other metros to get as close as we could to the residence. When we finally got off the RER, we were actually able to catch a cab. The only problem was that it couldn’t take all five of us at once. Somehow, the Spanish tracker boys got left behind. They had no idea where they were going and no phones. We thought they were right behind us, but after waiting for thirty minutes, we went back for them and they were nowhere to be found. Nanda and I gave ourselves some new ulcers worrying about them, until an hour and a half later they finally strolled up. They had walked for almost two hours and finally found the street that the residence is on. At this point, it was 3 am. Then, JR lost one of his diamond earrings and insisted on looking for it in the dark, so it wasn’t until after 4 am that he gave up looking and we finally got to sleep. Needless to say, we’re taking it easy today!

No comments: