Meet Gollum in Paris

Paris, eternal lover’s city. Who knew we would meet such a weird creature as Gollum over there ? Definitely not what one would expect from a romantic weekend spend in Paris. The backpacker was maybe not a good choice after all.

Christmas trip

We got a good opportunity to spend a few days over there and, as we’ve never been in Paris for christmas, that was an easy choice to decide to go. Booking trips is terribly time consuming for us, because there is no way to make up our mind before we had a look a every single possibilities… twice. So that time I just decided to go for the cheapest backpacker. But still we had to choose between two of them: one with breakfast or one with blankets. Definitely the hardest choice ever. What insane man would ask you to choose between food or sleep ? Eventually blankets got our votes as we never wake up early enough for breakfasts anyway.

For some reason Luna got to the backpacker before I did to drop our luggage. She met our roomate (privacy in backpacker ? no way) who was kind of scary as she described him.

Luna joined me in evening and we wandered in christmas market in La Défense. Thas was nice to look at. But weather was freaking cold and we very quickly got freezing. Cold in christmas market ? That’s perfect situation for a hot wine. Unless the so called hot wine is actually cold wine. That’s so much less yummy and so frustrating. We had to buy another one, a hot one, later on. I carefully observed steam coming out of every single pot on the market to get the hottest wine ever. By the time we could get it, my fingers were so frozen that I felt nothing when I spilled wine… a few times. Or was it alcohool effect ?

Back to the backpacker we got a few new international friends, even a Korean girl. Eating lichies and drinking (more) wine it looked like a quiet end of day. That was not counting on that guy who cried at the reception. We’ve been told that his room got broken in and all his belongings were stolen. Of course french cops kindly suggested to go to the police station, fill a few papers to declare the theft and … stay one more week in Paris to do so. I don’t know what that poor guy did, but if he’s got nothing left, why/how the hell would he stay there instead of going home the next day as planned ?

Evil vs Angel

It must be said that security was quite not the best feature at that backpacker. Rooms had only one single key each. That’s not exactly convenient when you share a room with 4-6 other people. I noticed that when we tried to enter our room and we had to knock because there was already a guy inside with the key. Not to mention he was sleeping. I could distinguish him very well, but Luna told me that was the weird guy she met earlier. Enough of weird stuff time to sleep.

In the morning I’ve been waken up by two guys talking. At first I didn’t pay much attention. But they spoke so much that I couldn’t sleep anymore. Then it came to my mind that there was only one guy and one girl in our room. Then who is this second guy ? That was really early in the morning and that was not likely that another guy came in our room at that time.

No matter how hard I look for any kind of explanation, only one was likely enough to be true. The voices were from the same weirdos. Gollum slept in the bed up to mine ! Even though I saw Luna moving, she pretented to sleep till the guy finally went out. So did I. Meanwhile I kept observing him. He had tatooes all over and every single piece of cloth he wore was totally black. The two differents voices kept on talking to each other all morning. It sounded like the good vs bad Gollum scene in LOTR. Quite freaky in real life.

To be be consistent with our romantic weekend turned in weird experience, we visited the catacombs. After quite a long walk underground in a “normal” cave, you suddenly face thousands of skulls and bones. That was a really impressive walk. Even more impressive was the exit were we Luna noticed that a guy check our bags. Not only a visitor before dared touching a skull, but he actually tried to steal it from catacomb. Talk about an excentric souvenir of Paris !

Museums

Luckily the rest of our trip was less emotionnally charged. Gollum appart (I almost got used to him even though I strangely got nervous before falling asleep next night) we had a nice (cold) day, visited Picasso museum, had a foggy, mystical view of Eiffel tower. On sunday, after a service in Notre Dame, we spent almost all day in the warm place that Orsay museum is.

Trip back home started 30 minutes late. That mean we knew 4 hours in advance that we would miss the last train connection in Geneva. The kind lady met in TGV helped us to get in touch with CFF and we eventually had a ride in taxi offered. Pretty sweet, except we arrived 2 hours later than planned. That was 02h00 in the morning when I reached my soft pillow.