La nuit blanche
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
5
36
Trip End
Ongoing
Paris,
Île-de-France,
France
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Bon soir,
Every year in Paris, and all over France, they do this thing called "La Nuit Blanche." It is an art festival that goes from 7 in the evening till 7 in the morning. They do all sorts of things, concerts, theater, art installations, videos, etc. all over town. So I headed into Paris with Anne at about 8 and arrived at 10, and got ready to stay up all night. They were doing things at all the train stations, and at Gare du Nord they had this giant contraption set up. It was a big rectangular white box that went all the way to the ceiling. It will be pretty hard to describe, because it was pretty crazy, but I'll try. So the bottom portion of the box had a video screen in it, showing all the people in the train station. The middle section you could see into, and there was a mouse trap-like set-up, with a ball going along a track and doing some other things. All the while smoke was coming out of the top. After awhile there was a countdown and the top of the box lifted up wings came out and it "blasted off" kind of; very odd.
After checking that out Anne and I met up with some other assistants near Les Halles. There was a big group there of about 15. We got some beers and chitchatted and then headed off to a café and chilled for awhile. The group kept getting smaller and I ended up with 6 other girls. One was from the UK, one from Mexico, and the rest were American. We wandered around a bit checked things out, went to some bars, etc. We wanted to check out the Pompidou center, but the line was crazy long. We wandered along the Seine and saw a building in which all the windows were lit up different colors and were pulsating to match up with music that was playing. We also found a couple groups of street musicians. At about 3 in the morning we found this thing going on in a church. It was very dark inside, and where the altar was there was a giant black rectangle that had a single light tube in it. There was all this fog around it and they were projecting different colored lights on it. Off to the side there was a man making music using these glass bowls filled with water and candles. He ran a small mallet around the edges of these bowls and it made a deep resonating sound. There were pillows on the ground and everyone was lying down and chilling out. We pretty much all feel asleep for about an hour. It was very peaceful. After that we wandered a bit more and found an exhibit set up call Tokyo Action. It was basically a bunch of Asian people on stage performing martial art routines/tricks. By that time it was about 6 in the morning and we were all dragging. We found a café, got some coffee and just relaxed for awhile. My train was leaving at 8, so after the coffees we went to the train station and left. Overall, it was a very cool thing to do, although I would have liked to see a few more exhibits. Sunday I pretty much slept all day. I was beat. I'm not sure what's next on my plate. This week I will start observing classes and hopefully explore some more of Laon, and then on October 25th our first vacation starts. I have at least a few paid vacation days every month. It is pretty great.
Au revoir,
Stephanie
