I went to Paris
Vince goes to card-gaming tournaments in odd places occasionally. He's always offering to let me tag along, but I don't usually fancy single handedly exploring the back-streets of Turin or Indianapolis while he sits in an airtight box full of sweaty nerds in an attempt to win an Ipod.
This time however, he was playing in Paris and since I happen to know some genuine Parisians this was different! Tourism is like most things improved by pleasant company, and Paris probably tops the tourism charts for a reason. The road-trip aspect of the weekend was a little offputting. Owing to the finances, work commitments and plain insanity of some of the card-gamers going to Paris, we eschewed trains and planes and decided to drive there. With a car filled to maximum capacity with nerds. Paris is a good eight hours drive from Manchester, but you do get a nice sit down in the middle as the creaking ancient ferries carry you and your car between Dover and Calais. I used to get horribly seasick on Ferries as a child, which it turns out still happens even now I am nearly 30. The horrible dizziness meant that I didn't do much driving after the ferries, which was probably for the best.
The Hotel we were in was cheap, nasty and impossible to find at 4am. We only discovered that we were in the wrong postcode when in desperation we finally found a streetmap on a bizarre automated bike-hiring station. I am so investing in a Sat-nav before I try any more driving on the wrong side of the road. Vince would keep going the wrong way down one-way streets, using the excuse that at 5 in the morning no-one would ever know. Just because they didn't, doesn't mean he was right!
Gael and Agnes were just as I remembered them from Maelstrom, except of course cleaner and with an adorable three-year-old Daughter. Tamsin was very sweet and well-behaved for my entire visit, and completely fearless in the face of a giant room full of skeletons.
This was the Paris Natural History museum of course, which is a gorgeous place in which I would love to run a Victoriana game. We had a quick poke around the botanical gardens and their lovely menagerie, where once again Red Pandas were cute at me. Following a delicious lunch we bought the best cake ever from an artisan patisserie, and ate it in the ruins of the Roman arena. Agnes and Tamsin then went to visit parents and grandparents, and Gael took me on a long, informative and beautiful walk around the interesting bits of Paris. We saw Notre Dame, and the Hotel de Ville, the Place de Bastille, all of the Latin Quarter and a whole load of other places that were very beautiful but whose names I can't remember because I didn't write them down.
We couldn't go inside Notre Dame because the queue was almost a mile long, so we contented ourselves with going into the Pantheon instead, gawking at the tombs of the heroes of France and having a good look at Foucalt's pendulum, still doing its thing in the middle of the rotunda.
After a very long walk around the city we were both pretty knackered, so we had a bit of a sit down in a cafe and a talk about larp which continued into the evening when I went back to their flat for dinner. Agnes was building a giant papier-mache squid on the dining room table, proving that in spite of the language barrier and the difference in games, larpers are the same everywhere. Gael agreed very kindly to continue the tour the next morning, and so we did.
We'd hoped to take a trip into the catacombs, but once again since it was lovely weather and the middle of the tourist season, the queue was almost a mile long. Instead we saw the Eiffel Tower. Man, but it is ugly up close... In addition to being a dull brown colour that put me in mind of something between rust and poo, it is clearly a feat of Engineering and is all about the girders. Attempts to pretty it up with curlicues and golden inscriptions of France's famous scientists are a bit too small in comparison to the general steel contraption feeling, and I couldn't help but sympathise with the locals of 1889, who considered it an eyesore and quite out of keeping with the lovely architecture of the surrounding streets. The funniest thing about the Eiffel Tower were the street vendors that surrounded it, each one with a huge ring covered in little model towers in ascending order of size, something like the worlds largest and most insane keyring. I resisted buying a little Eiffel Tower for poor Vince, who had spent the whole time in a tiny overheated conference centre, eating nothing but Niknaks and drinking nothing but Cola.
After a delicious lunch of steak and garlic potatoes, we attempted to find another patisserie so that I could bring awesome cake to the poor benighted nerds who had seen nothing at all of Paris. Having bought the cakes, we tried to find the conference centre where the nerds were congregated, but it turned out to be harder than we thought. Several hours late and somewhat exhausted we finally found Vince and the others, at which point Gael had to go in search of shopping for his family. Vince and the other nerds devoured the cakes in short order, since they had not been fed properly for the entire weekend. I on the other hand had eaten like a king, and was only kept from having a gouty king-belly by the miles of walking that I'd done. After collecting tournament prizes (everyone had won something, and Vince won some money, yay!) it was time for another insane 8 hour drive. Owing to our lack of sleep, it rapidly became nine hours as we had to stop for a nice long break with a nap and some burgers. We arrived at 5.30 on Monday morning, with two of our number then going to work later that day. Nutters.
I on the other hand slept for far too long, buggering up my sleep pattern for the rest of the week and making myself really cranky. I did have an amazing time though, so it was totally worth it :)