Nights Out on the Town

French Bar painting by Henri Toulouse de Lautrec

One of the less glamorous parts of Parisian nightlife is trying to get home. Depending on the day of the week, the metro closes between 12:30 and 2:00 am. It doesn’t reopen again until 6 am. Cabs are essentially nonexistent. As far as I can tell, the French people stay out until six. I don’t have that kind of stamina.

Somewhere in the space between trying to leave the bar/club/party before the last metro home and trying to convince ourselves that we can make it till 6 am, my friends and I almost invariably end up resolving to find a cab, usually between 3 and 4 am. This strategy has about a 50% rate of failure. This no-cab-in-sight scenario leads to the let’s-start-walking-in-the-direction-of-home-until-we-see-one scenario. The latter scenario has a 100% failure rate. It’s Paris’ Law of Late Night Cabs: if a cab is not successfully hailed within a 3-block radius of the departure location, no cab shall be successfully hailed for the remainder of the evening.

Crap. Now what? Well… I guess we’ll just have to walk home…

And that, my friends, is the story of how I get my exercise on my semester abroad. I call it “Endurance Walking,” although sometimes it looks more like endurance stumbling. I do it several times a week, always before sunrise. I’m really dedicated like that.

There’s a chance I might get some endurance walking in tonight. We’re going to “Student Night” at a bar in Mabillon. When the bar gets too crowded, the bouncer asks the people outside to show their student ID cards, you know, to make sure they’re all young enough to get in. Paris makes me laugh.

In honor of Student Night, the drinks are cheaper: 5 Euros. Normally, drinks in Paris are between 8 and 15 Euros. Let’s do the math:          8 Euro X 1.4 = $11.20 USD... Ouch.

My default drink of choice has always been the Screwdriver (why not get some Vitamin C with my alc.?) In my experiences, the Screwdriver is not always equivalent to its French counterpart, Vodka Orange. When I order my Vodka Orange, s’il vous plaît, I’m often returned with quizzical looks; “you mean, you want vodka mixed with orange juice, and that’s it?” In one of these instances, I was served a glass of vodka and a pitcher of orange juice. Then, at the next bar, when I give up the title and just order what I want, “I’ll have vodka mixed with orange juice, please,” I am returned with another quizzical look, “so, you mean you want a Vodka Orange?”

(Also, if you are an American in Paris looking to buy a cocktail, here’s a word to the wise: ask for a lot of ice- “beaucoup de glaceau”. The French like their iced drinks warm.)

Ultimately, I do get some variation on what I originally wanted. And by the end of the night I end up with my daily dose of vitamin C and some exercise from the 2-mile walk I inadvertently took. Who knew going to a bar could be such a healthy activity?