My morning mitfahr to Paris was a bit sketch. The guy driving spoke German with a strong French accent, which was definitely something I hadn’t heard before, and that led to some trouble getting our meeting point straight. I got lucky that it was like a little service that a few French guys had decided to run, and there was more than one mitfahr from Cologne to Paris that morning from the train station. Despite betting ditched by the first driver, there was a second ride available to get me to Paris.

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I took a train to the south side of Paris where I was set to meet up with a friend from UCLA who had been living in Paris for a month. After getting some (bad) directions from Kim, I got lost fairly quickly but eventually found my way. Surely enough the first expedition I would make after meeting up with a bunch of girls from LA is a trip to a huge mall in Paris that was having massive seasonal sales (which are apparently dictated by the government). I shouldn’t sell the experience short, because it was a pretty incredible old mall.

I also got burned for attempting to beat the fares of the Paris metro, which I thought would be a non-issue due to the general frequency of the practice I had witnessed so far, as well as the number of people with month-long passes that I was travelling with. It turns out the fee for breaking the fare is 50 euros, payable immediately. Fortunately I had the cash on me to cough up, otherwise I would have had to use my credit card and pay the bank fees as well!

Afterwards Kim and Joanna (Kim’s roommate) took me out to what they termed the “Gay and Jewish” district of Paris, which I found to be a strange combination. I did see a fair bit of gay, but not so much Jew, upon arrival. We walked around the area a bit an had some delicious pizza at a little cafe. We also indulged in some unbelievably tasty ice cream, before heading over toward the Eiffel Tower to meet up with some more of the UCLA crew.

We walked a ways east of the tower which gave us a great view of the now-clear-sky sunset behind the tower. To my pleasant surprise some time around dusk the entire tower lights up and sparkles for about five minutes at the onset of each subsequent hour. It really was an inspiring scene, no matter how cliche it may have been. The three of us spent awhile under the tower before heading back to the hotel room where they both lived.

The next day a few of us headed out together to the Paris Opera house, which to be blunt was just another fancy Parisian building. It is easy to become desensitized to things like it, when there are so many buildings that in any other setting would be completely unbelievable. Even with extreme grand entryways, massive mirrors, old art and sculptures, the Opera House really just seems to feel like a normal part of Paris.

That night a decent number of the UCLA crew and I resolved to go out clubbing. It was student night nearly everywhere, so it wouldn’t break the bank (unlike nearly everything else in Paris). Although to be fair, the student night drinks still cost at least double what they did in Berlin on any night. Anyways, after going to a cool little pub, about 10 to 12 of us headed to a club called Duplex which is underground, not more than a few hundred feet away from L’Arc De Triumph.