An Evening In Paris

So we headed from Portugal to Paris on a 22 hour train journey to catch a concert by “Lifelike”. He is a French House musician, I’m not really a fan, but my brother is, so we booked his concert.

We had already crossed France once during the trip and didn’t like it much there, so we weren’t really willing to spend much time in Paris either. Both of us had already seen it and we thought that a day should be enough. The plan was to reach at around 8 at night and then catch the concert at 11. The concert was to end at 6am and we thought we would go back to the hostel sleep a bit and then move on to the next city after visiting the main sites like the Eiffel tower and Champs Elyse.

Now first of all, getting to Paris itself was a pain. The French make life as hard as possible for you. There are only a few seats that are reserved for Eurail pass holders and if those are exhausted, then you have to buy the full fare ticket! If you think you can manage without a reservation, you cant. Almost all the trains going to Paris are TGVs and hence require it. However, don’t think that since they are TGVs they will go fast, no. In our 8 hour journey across France, most of it was at a speed of 150 Km/hr in the TGV. The TGV part is just to make u pay more, not reach faster. So we got a reservation on the train, but since the cheapest were not available, we had to go for a reservation cost of 18 Euros each!

When we finally go to Paris, we took a metro to our hostel. With some difficulty, we found it and guess what, it was closed! We were left stranded at 10 in the night. We decided to just go to the club and since it was an all night concert, we would figure out what to do in the morning. So we got to the venue and that was closed as well. As it turned out, since the concert was from 11, the club would also open at 11 (this wasn’t a normal concert, since it was a DJ, it was in a club). So we went for dinner at whatever we found open and at 11 we were able to get into the club. The cost of a hostel would have been around 15 Euros each and the cost of just keeping the bags in the club cloak room turned out to be 11 each! It was so expensive! Even a small bottle of water was 5 Euros! And by small I mean 330mL.

The night had 4 performers and the one we were waiting for was the last one. so we basically got a couple of places to sit and started to rest and wait till our time came. It was going to be a long night. We didn’t even have any water, since if we took out our bags to get water, it would cost us the same amount of money once again to put it back. So we just bought 1 bottle and waited. By the time Lifelike came, we were really tired and worn out, but Bharat was extremely enthusiastic once the guy did come on stage and it was nice.

The crowd had also reduced significantly and he was playing music that I also could tolerate. So basically we went to the front and watched the show. At this point we realised what all was going on in the club. Before this point, we were just sitting bored waiting for Lifelike. Now suddenly being in the thick of things, we saw how drunk people were and how guys were constantly trying to pick up chicks. Frankly it was a bit weird, random guys would start dancing with random girls, start making out suddenly and leave and all this in just 15-20 mins! It was a bit of a culture shock, but anyways, we just saw the show and were eager to get some sleep. We had decided we would go to Frankfurt from there. It was a weekend and we would be a lot more comfortable there.

At 6 am, we finally got out of the club, drank lots of water and headed to the metro station to get to the train station. Finally we got on to the train and we had opted for a direct train, since we needed to get some sleep. So we got on and went to sleep. Suddenly after a few hours we were woken up frantically by a DB staff member asking us where we wanted to go. We said Frankfurt, she told us to go to the train on the opposite platform immediately. We realised the train was stationary and empty. We just grabbed our stuff and boarded the other train. Before sleeping we had put our phones on charging and had basically spread out our luggage a bit. So we got on in a pretty bad shape. In any case, we were able to get to Frankfurt and finally get some sleep.