Nuit Blanche!

This past Saturday night/Sunday morning was Nuit Blanche, which means "sleepless night."  It's  an annual all-night cultural festival that was started in 2002 and has since spread to a bunch of other cities.  The city sets up all of these really cool art exhibits and musical concerts all over the city that are open all night long (7pm-7am) and are totally free.  So here's my night in pictures...

The first exhibit that we visited was this giant beam of light that you could see all over Paris.  It was actually composed of a bunch of beams of light converging and when you got up close, they were playing this really weird sci-fi sounding music so you kind of felt like you were going to be beamed up into a UFO at any moment.

So the next leg of our journey (despite the smiles on our faces) was really sad.  At 2am on the weekends, the metro closes until 5:30 am.  So around 1:20, my friends and I hoped on a train to take us towards the area of Paris where most of the Nuit Blanche stuff was going on.  5 stops into our 7 stop trip, a ton of people got on the metro because at that point it was going to be probably one of the last trains of the night.  People shoved their way in and when the doors closed, no one could move.  Literally.  We took off for the next stop but a couple seconds after we left, the train stopped and we just stood there for awhile.  Then, all the lights except for the emergency ones went off.  Finally, the conductor made an announcement that we were stopped because a person might be underneath the train.  People started freaking out, but there wasn't much that they could do because literally no one could move.  After some more waiting, people started prying open doors, sticking their heads out the windows, yelling, banging on the sides of the cars, and screaming.  It was incredibly hot but no one could move enough to take their coats and scarves off.  After about 30 to 40 minutes of waiting, police finally came and evacuated the train. It wasn't until I read it in the newspaper the next day that I found out that whoever was stuck underneath the subway did end up dying.  To occupy ourselves while we were waiting for the train to start moving again, we took a bunch of pictures but I don't think they show how incredibly crowded it really was.

View of Notre Dame at night.

This was a really cool art exhibit that we accidentally stumbled upon.  The artist took a bunch of dress forms into the Dead Sea and by dipping them into the water over and over again gradually accumulated a layer of salt.  At the exhibit, they showed the salted dress forms, as well as a video of him making them.  Also, they covered the entire floor in salt and you had to put on little booties before you were allowed in.  

Video on the side of the building of the artist with observers sitting in the salt, watching.

Gare de Lyon clock tower.

Our last stop of the night was the filming of a Bollywood movie.  I found out afterwards that (I think, based on my ability to read the news article in French) that they weren't actually filming for a real Bollywood movie, but that it was just a special event for Nuit Blanche, which is kind of disappointing and I like to pretend that I'm going to see this in theaters in a couple of months.

Kelsey and Rachel trying to get a good view of the Bollywood from atop a large planter.
Even though that was the end of the Nuit Blanche events for us, it was far from the end of the night.  One thing I've learned is that getting a taxi in Paris after the metro closes is a hard task, made harder when it's raining (which it was), and impossible when it's Nuit Blanche and the whole world is out.  So we wandered around Paris for about an hour and a half, tried to take the Velibs (rentable bikes), met a nice German man, looked for a cab number only to discover the next morning that there were 3 of them in the guide book that we all carry with us, and finally decided to just walk home only to chance upon an empty cab at about 4:30 in the morning.  Ironically enough though, it turns out that our cab driver had taken us home the previous weekend.  Then I got home and crashed.