Darcy's Paris Blog

Bumming around the city and hitting the "in" bar with Neil

Slept in a little bit today. Neil came up to my place and helped me hang curtains in my bedroom. Hooray! Privacy! He thinks I could've reached up there, but I'm still not sure. If the rod falls down, I'll be finding out, but so far, so good. (Thank you again, Neil! What would I do without you?) After that we walked through some pretty streets towards Abbesses and Place du Tertre (the one on the Montmartre hill with all the artists.) After enough crowds and crappy tourist traps, we metro'd downtown and just kept walking. We'd thought of going in the Pompidou for a temporary exhibit, but decided to skip out, so we pretty much just walked around central Paris all day. It was lovely. We thought about heading to the Jardin du Luxembourg, but the weather turned pretty rainy, so we hung out in a cafe for drinks and a crepe. A wonderful, lazy afternoon. Thought about a movie to get out of the rain -- we weren't in the mood for museums, and many of their movies here are English with French subtitles -- but decided not to try to squeeze that in, either. Metro'd up to my apartment, where we both ended up falling asleep a little on the (huge) couch -- quick stop at Neil's hotel -- then tried a restaurant near Charles de Gaulle Etoile (Arc de Triomphe) that a guy at work recommended. Everyone here kinda gives him a hard time about being the typically swank Parisian guy, but this place didn't quite fit that mold. It was a Cuban-styled place with typically French food, folding chairs in the bar, and an awful cover band doing American tunes in English. (I'm not convinced they really understood the words, but it was good enough to attract a few middle-aged groupies in the front.) From there we went to Buddha Bar -- supposedly the trendy place to go now -- down near Concorde. It felt like you could've transported that bar to any major world city -- in fact, it reminded me a lot of Tao or Asia de Cuba in NYC -- giant budda; dark; loud, monotonous music; super-crowded; expensive -- but, that's what you get when you go where all the beautiful people are. It was worth it to check it out, at least, but when 80% of the tables were still eating dinner at 1 AM, I was glad we'd decided not to eat there...

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posted by Darcy @ 10:38 PM