Before I start this note in earnest, I have to explain that ever since I found out that we would be in Paris for Halloween, I had this stuck in my head (thanks to my French II teacher in high school):
So that’s what I woke up thinking about on our last full day in Paris, and what remained in my head throughout the day’s events.
We had planned, appropriately, to spend the morning in a cemetery – the Père Lachaise Cemetery to be precise. This giant graveyard is the final resting place of over 300,000 people, including such notable figures as Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, and Oscar Wilde.
The cemetery seemed to be doing its very best to be Halloween-like for us, too. The leaves were all yellow and orange and scuttling around in the wind, and a black cat even crossed our path at one point. It would have been kind of spooky if the weather hadn’t been so crisp and sunny and clear. Instead it was really beautiful.
After wandering through the cemetery all three of my travel companions went off to meet other friends who were staying in the area, leaving me with a couple of hours to kill before I was supposed to try to meet up with someone myself. I spent that time at the Musée Rodin, which had been highly recommended to me by my Dutch art history professor, my French friend living in Amsterdam, and my American friend studying in Paris as a place worth seeing. The rather small museum, which is a bit off the beaten path in Paris by the Hotel des Invalides, did not disappoint, and I happily passed my time admiring the sculpture both inside and outside the building.
I had been trying since Thursday to get hold of the American friend of mine who is studying abroad in Paris for the semester, and after a bit of crossed-signals back-and-forth, had finally made contact online. She had given me her phone number and we had arranged for a time to meet, but as my phone wasn’t working very well on the French networks, I never managed to get in touch with her to pin down an exact place to meet. I left the Musée Rodin a bit before I was supposed to meet up with her, and I took the Metro down to the 2e arrondissement (which is where she supposedly lives).
I hoped against hope that she would somehow try to call me and manage to break through the bad connections, but alas, that never happened. Instead I wandered around the 2e for over an hour exploring with less and less enthusiasm as it became clearer and clearer I was not going to find anyone.
I did however, see something that made me chuckle (and gave me small hopes of festivities later in the evening): a costume shop with a line of people stretching nearly an entire block out the door. Oh French people, I thought to myself, you’re still getting used to this whole Halloween thing, aren’t you?
I systematically tried calling each of my three friends to see where they were, and was met with voicemails, busy signals and could-not-connects all around. I tried to buy a crepe to boost my spirits, but was blatantly ignored by the vendor – who chose to serve a giant mass of people who barged ahead of me instead. I was frustrated, hungry, and more than a little tired – in short, pretty cranky, by my standards. I decided the best thing to do would be to go back to the hotel and rest until my friends returned from their adventures. So that’s what I did (I also got my crepe – at last – from a kindly old lady selling them at a little shop near our hotel).
One crepe, one nap, and one friendly phone call from Marie later, I was feeling in slightly higher spirits and was ready to meet up with my friends – all of them this time, including the group who had come later – for dinner back near Notre Dame/the Latin Quarter. We met up easily only to split up again, as half of us wanted to find food that was quick and cheap, and the other half wanted to find somewhere to sit down that would likely be more expensive.
Those of us who took the quick, cheap route, ended up finding a place to sit anyway – the basement area of a pita shop that was empty except for us. Dinner was uneventful – until the lights went out in the middle of it and we were momentarily stranded in the dark (we thought they had forgotten we were down there and turned off the light – turns out it was just a brief power outage). But it was cheap and filling and it was nice to sit down and just eat and relax for awhile.
After dinner Adeola accompanied Conny back to our room so that Conny could change into the epic Halloween costume she had made. The rest of us went into to a noisy bar/club place called the Latin Corner, where they served drinks with sparklers in them and played bizarre videos and loud techno music. We didn’t stay there much longer than it took to finish a drink, then we took to the street in search of a quieter and less expensive (I had paid nearly €6 for a soda!) locale. We didn’t really find one, but we did meet up with Adeola, and Conny – who was decked out in her costume.
Conny had decided to be a lion for Halloween, and had ingeniously crafted a costume from a hooded sweatshirt that she had died yellow. She sewed thick brown yarn and cloth ears onto the hood, wore some yellow tights and fixed a fabric tail to her shorts, painted a nose and some whiskers on her face with eyeliners, and voila! A cute (and stylish) lion costume for a Parisian Halloween. Note – originally I was going to be a lion tamer to go along with Conny’s costume, but a lack of time for crafting and a lack of desire to spend money on a costume nixed that plan. Conny rocked her costume nonetheless.
We did what we do best and wandered around Paris for awhile. There were a couple of other young people dressed up for the occasion, but not really anything else to do. The whole group of us (amount to about 8 or 9 people at this point) sat in front of Notre Dame for awhile, watching the crowds and some random street performers.
Eventually about half the group decided to head back and go to bed, while the other half stayed out awhile longer and looked for some more adventures. I gladly joined the bed-bound crowd and made it back to Montmartre with Marie. I stayed up only long enough to pack most of my things, and then crashed, eager to catch some sleep before our long bus ride back to Amsterdam the next day.
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