First Night Out in Paris (Proper) UPDATED!!!

1-7-11 (RM, France; Paris, France)

The class is having a meet'n'greet event tonight at "Le Cafe Oz," and Australian pub. I will post more on this later, including pictures. Wish me luck!

Ok, so I couldn't really get my cell phone pictures to come out but let's just say the bar was amazing. We started out kind of chill about 6:30/7:00pm and then the night got progressively more crazy from there. The drinking culture is different here because I think people are more secure with themselves. I tried to follow along and not drink too much, but still maintain a little buzz for extra courage. The bar got insanely crowded so it was really fun dancing all around with different girls and not giving two shits about it. I was mainly just dancing because it was fun to bounce around to the music and just let loose.

But of course there were girls, oh yes, the girls. I guess over here there is a very macho culture of taking what you want when you are interested. The girls will dance with whoever has enough balls to grab them by the hands and pull them out to dance. I had to learn this over the course of the evening because I though French people were more polite than this. NOPE! Next weekend, I see a pretty girl, I take her. That's about the long and short of getting women to go dance and have fun with you. I was close to dancing with this amazing girl but then her two friends pulled an international cock-block on me and told their friend, Claire I think, that they were going to the other side of the bar. Lame. I didn't really want to put up with much bullshit so I pretty much just blew them off to go hang out with my friends from IFP.

I feel very lucky that everyone from class is so easygoing and fun to go out and drink with. People like to talk about their respective countries and cultures and they aren't really afraid to get into tough economic or social issues. Nobody is disrespectful and very open-minded. Of course people have strong opinions, but it is much more fun to discuss rather than argue with people like it is in the States.

As far as the dancing goes, Europeans are... well... pretty funny I guess. They play alot of American music like hiphop, rock mix, etc but they are so mechanical in their dancing. People jerk around really fast like they have to keep up with every beat. Me, I just go out my own pace every other beat or so. I think dancing on the 1/3 beats kind of threw some people off but I got some respect for it. Maybe people look to American dancing styles because that is where the music as well as the music videos come from. Booyah.

Mad props go out to my friend Geraldine for her awesome Latin dancing. Same can be said for the two girls from Spain. Damn son, they can move. Geraldine was nice enough to put up with failed attempt to Latin dance with her, but she helped by showing me different spin style moves and such. We danced in the middle of all our friends at IFP so it was definitely a good show. Hopefully there will be many more weekends filled with long nights of drinking, dancing, and fun.

I decided to call it a night about 1:30am because I was under the impression that the mertro closed around 2am. I think they remain closed until about 5 or 6am. A few people were going to stay out until morning and take the train home then. I probably should have stayed out later since I'm sure it gets really interesting as the night goes on and people move from bars to the disco clubs. I didn't feel the need to rush everything all at once so, so I'll probably save the late, late night for next weekend.

Good times, good times.


Song of the Day: I Come From a Land Down Under by Men at Work