With our strategically date transferred tickets, we left Vietnam a week early with the guise to surprise a schoolmate of mine (Seb) in Paris for his 30th birthday. I’d love to say that the idea was mine, but Seb’s wonderful wife Doreen was the mastermind….
We arrived into Paris at about 6am and with customs, the TGV and a brief walk onto Seb’s island (That’s right they live on an island on the Seine in Paris – Ooh la la) we arrived at Seb and Doreen’s doorstep at about 9am Friday morning. Thinking we would surprise for Seb upon his arrival home from work, we were in fact surprised to find him still in the shower. We avoided the “Naked Seb” surprise and managed to properly confuse the old man as we stood in his kitchen chatting to Doreen. But that was just the mini surprise…
The big surprise was still to come tomorrow, Doreen had organised a belated surprise birthday party with groups of friends travelling from Australia, London, Paris, France, Spain all meeting up on the banks of the Seine to have a big b’day picnic. Amazing work Doreen! Of course, the only person in the dark of what was happening was Seb. This leads to the first obstacle we had to overcome…
For anyone who knows Seb, he is not one to miss out on anything, and knowing we were in town, his 10am start to work, ended up being 1pm start. This meant that later that evening, when Seb arrived home from work, he was adamant to reignite this party, at least one notch. Staying in for dinner was easy as Doreen had prepared another amazing meal for us all, but convincing Seb not to head out was more difficult. It must have been weird for any tourists – let alone booze hounds like us – to turn down a night in Paris, but we blamed the jet lag and stayed in to play some cards. All was fine until Seb saw a bottle of Vodka that Doreen had purchased for the surprise party. Thinking on my feet I claimed that I purchased it Duty Free and we can have some if we want. Well, between Seb and I, we casually polished off the entire bottle of Absolut before we had even finished our card game. This caused no concern to Seb, but for me, I knew we had 20+ people coming tomorrow from around the globe for a party that started at lunchtime.
Our cunning ruse for the next morning was to get Seb to take us to a phone shop to help us get a French simcard for our phone (a half lie, as we really did need his help). The problem we had was logistical. We had to get Seb up, in the shower and ready, so he could take us to the shop by 10:30, because guests were arriving anytime from then. Doreen also needed that time to prepare everything, grab the position on the Seine and let all the fellow travellers into their apartment. Now, imagine you have been woken at 9am on a Saturday morning, by your douchebag mates from Australia, after downing an entire bottle of vodka (not to mention the beers), with some lame excuse about getting a phone card; you would be feeling like Seb was – confused. But chipper as Seb is, we finally got him out the door at about 10:55, only minutes before guests arrived.
Perfectly timed, we left the shop a little after noon, and started stumbling back to L’ile St Louis. The next step was to convince Seb to take us down to the banks of the Seine where the party was being held. We thought this would be no problems as our next cunning plan was to get Seb to guide us there to take a “Duncan Starjump” photo from banks. Again, this led us back to the first hiccup – the bottle of vodka. Without said bottle, Seb would have been happy to show off his beautiful neighbourhood, instead, the bottle made him want to lay down his head within his beautiful residence. Despite the pleas, Seb said that he desperately needed to go upstairs to his apartment to grab a drink of water before anything could be done. As we walked up his flight of starts Kam and I were really worried that people were waiting for us, that he might find evidence of a party upstairs or worse. When we arrived up there, we found out the “or worse” part. All of the traveller’s bags were filling the living room, and Kam and I knew that the jig was up… However, the ‘magical vodka powers’ that made Seb want to sleep, had the power to also make the bags, rucksacks, sleeping gear and clothing invisible.
With all the subtlety of a sledge hammer we got Seb out of the apartment and down to the Seine, where waiting for him were 15 or so people all wearing matching T-shirts with Seb’s ugly mug on them! To say he was surprised was an understatement; and for me and Kam it was so amazing to see so many mates from Adelaide again!! The location was amazing, looking over at all the “real” tourists walking around seeing the sights, as we sat back, and ate cheese, drank champagne, devoured jambon, and even polished off a macaroon cake – we all felt a little bit Parisian (apart from speaking English of course).
As day turned to night we took to the streets and went to a local burger joint (IYBurger) for some gourmet burgers and drinks. NO content with drinks in bottles or proper sized glasses, we opted to continue the night at a vodka bar, which served paddles of flavoured vodka shots. After 3 (maybe 4) paddles, this is where the night got messy. I have memories of Seb artfully avoiding his fair share of vodka shots, Hayley going AWOL, Cheryl fighting a bout of hiccups, The catwalk parade, midnight Jambon carving, the story teller, indepth discussion and Doreen waking up to cook Calvert pasta. It was one of those day/nights I will never remember everything that happened, but I know I will never forget having my mates in Paris, on an island on the Seine having a party. Brilliant!
As we had all made a weekend of it, we all awoke late the next morning and had grand plans to do many things. After showers, breakfasts, youtubes and discussions, it was afternoon, before we left the apartment. This day turned out to be “5 minutes too late” day. Trying to organise 10 people is hard at the best of times, but throw in hangovers, lack of sleep, foreign languages, a constant 15 minute stream of rollerbladers (I kid you not), and Gummow spending 40 minutes ironing his shirt, we were destined to miss something. We arrived to the Pompidou to have half the group waiting for us (rollerbladers fault). After fluffing round checking out prices, times etc, we decided to go see the Catacombs. This led to goodbyes for some, trains to catch, and we got on our way to the Catacombs. Following the Lonely Planet’s advice, the catacombs shut at 5pm, so we thought if we got there around 4 that would leave us about 1 hour to look around. Apparently, “about 4” is not good enough, door shut at 4pm (which would have been more helpful Lonely Planet), and even though we were standing there at 4:05pm there was nothing we could do. But we got off lightly, Our 5 minute delay actually saved us money, not so for Gummow, his 5 minute delay caused him to buy a new ticket back to London at £175. Not so pretty!
Our weekend in Paris finished in a truly French way – Crepes for lunch, Absinthe bar for dinner, and a bike ride trough Paris in the dark – pretty awesome! Early the next morning, the staggered goodbyes meant that soon Doreen was left with just Kam and I, it was then we realised our next leg of the journey had begun, time to say goodbye to Paris and pick up our car!
