"What are we going to do tonight?" the kids asked. Well hell, I don't know, but pick your butts up, we aren't sitting around the apartment.
We walked back over near the Pompidou Center, where there are loads of restaurants, and found ourselves at a middle eastern sandwich shop. I have only the vaguest clue what I ate, but it was tasty. There was an Asian drum group playing nearby, and when they finished, a rock band was getting set up. Walking past the art museum, we saw a Venice Beach kind of scene: break dancers, singers, chalk artists, and so on. Touristy, but still fun, and the crowds were all good-natured and not too rowdy...and we were standing under a Dali mural, for petesakes.
We went down to City Hall, where people were walking around on a surface that converts to an ice rink in winter. Everyone was staring at the ground, so we investigated. Turns out they had printed two huge, huge maps on some sort of ground covering: one of Paris in 1914, and one in 2014. You could walk around and see what your neighborhood map looked like, and people were roaming all over the place, following some sort of personal maps in their heads. Very cool.
We walked back over to Notre Dame so Greg and the kids could see the back and sides of it, and strangely, it was open and free and had no lines. Now that's odd, we thought, because the line to get in last night was across the plaza. Then we got inside and there was a choir concert going on. What a choir. It was like one voice, but a hundred voices, and the cathedral amplified everything and made it unreal. I wish I could have called someone from my cell phone to say, "Listen, I'm up in heaven," to see if anyone would believe me. That's certainly the music you'd expect.
I lit a candle for my brother in there. I figure he would have liked that kind of thing. It felt a little silly, but still the right thing to do.
We walked back in the direction of our rental, stopping for crepes and glacé, and nearly every street corner had a band performing. What on earth is happening in this town? Ohhhh, it's the Fete de Musique. Translation: everyone is everywhere, many are drunk, and everyone is dancing and singing. I was trying to press through a crowd behind two old men, when suddenly they stopped and started dancing to some rock band. It would have been hilarious, except I was trying to steer Nicky through the throngs and it wasn't easy. I must have had a grim warrior-face on, because one guy saw me, whooped like, "Hey, this is awesome fun!" and gestured for me to dance. I had to crack up. Everyone was ridiculous and happy...except maybe the guy who was completely asleep/unconscious under the weak shelter of two ATMs, where people just kept stepping over him to get their cash. He didn't budge. I suspect he was on another cosmic plane.
Every kind of band was out there somewhere, including the Irish Orchestral Music of Paris group, just down our street a block or two. I live in fear of bagpipes, so we hurried past while they were playing some sort of flutey tunes. It was the perfect ending to a night that started with an Asian drum group and went through a Catholic choir, rock bands, pop cover bands, and a whole city full of people dancing and acting like fools.
Awesome.
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