My Trip to Paris - January 14-19, 2004

PAGE SIX

January 18, 2004
9:00pm, Paris France - Café de la Musique
At 9:00pm Me, Mark, Ron, Dusty, Eric and Sean stop off at Café de la Musique for a few drinks. It's expensive there and we pound down 140 euro worth of beer, long island ice teas, ice cream, salad and more. Basically we gorged on the wonderful food and drink. Man the French really make great food. Yes, I said that before, I know. ;)

At 10:30 we say goodbye to Mark who had to teach a class in the morning. Once again I have to say thank you to Mark for being a great tour guide, interpreter and all around nice guy. He gave up basically three days to keep us from looking like "stooges" in Paris and really getting the most from our visit. Thanks again, Mark!

At 11:30 our awesome waiter William tells us where we can go hit the town - The Champs Elysées! We had tried a lot of bars in the Pantin area but they close early. So we headed down to a pretty cool Salsa bar right off the Champs.

We enter the place and it's really only about 1/4 full but there are plenty of cute girls in there and lots of salsa dancing going on. We're there about 15 minutes and I decide to start up a conversation with a really sexy French girl and her very cute friend. The conversation is going great and after a few minutes she asks me to dance.

"I don't salsa" I say to her. "Oh come on!" she says in broken English. "No really" I replied "I don't salsa". So off she drags me on to the dance floor. Her cute friend grabs Ron and they start dancing. Well, he's really twirling her around and she's loving it. As I am on the dance floor I try and tell her, "I don't salsa" and about 10 seconds into it she realizes I am not kidding and gets mad. So I walk back upstairs to find Ron still twirling her friend. The minute her friend sees me she makes a bee line to her friend downstairs. Apparently, they either both dance or none do :)

We all go back to drinking and having a good time. We spark up conversations with the locals but for the most part, a lot of them did not speak English and our French was terrible so we were not getting anywhere. Note to all Americans headed to Paris: LEARN FRENCH FIRST!!! You will be 100 times better off it you plan to spend more than a few days there. There is more to the party story but for the most part, we all just got buzzed and headed to the hotel to crash.

In the morning, Dusty, Ron and I headed to the Metro and said our goodbyes at the Airport. The plane ride back to LA was uneventful. The only thing that concerned me was the security at Charles de Gaulle. It was much more relaxed than at LAX.

The next page contains an overview of my thoughts on the trip and my thanks. Please read it as I think it's worthy information.

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