Nuit Blanche (White Night)

Saturday! Market Day! Of course, first on our list for the day is to go to the street market! It is great as usual. The vendors are all happy and very nice to see you come and spend your money. We decided to buy lunch and dinner there. So we had to get our favorite, the Tartiflette, a yummy dish of what we would call scalloped potatoes. Slices of small potatoes, onion, small ham cubes, and a special cheese. It costs as much as fresh oysters at the market—12.90 Euros per Kilo. That’s about $20 for two pounds or $10 a pound. You can get King Crab for that price back home, but here, it’s what you pay for scalloped potatoes!

Anyway, we bought a kilogram of Tartiflette for lunch and then we also bought another potato dish for dinner. It was kind of like the potatoes, onions, and carrots you get when you cook a pot roast. We also bought a slab (a thick slice) of precooked, pork tenderloin, about six inches in diameter. So we ate very well today (and save some for another day!)

Tonight is Nuit Blanche. It is celebrated in many cities around the world. On Paris’ webpage, I think it said this is the eighth annual celebration. I think it’s supposed to be a celebration of art, (we have read that each year 3 different arrondisments sponsor Nuit Blanche and the main theme is to get people out to experience art from district to district) and millions of people turn out for the event. But it looks like it’s really just another excuse to party! I think the idea is to light up the night (with lights!).

Three years ago we were here at the same time and Nuit Blanche was amazing. Go back in our archive of this blog and look in October of 2006. The title of Tragedy! is the one where we experienced Nuit Blanche for the first time. It had all of the monuments lit up with blue lights and it was quite amazing.Tonight’s Nuit Blanche was sort of ho-hum. There were crowds and crowds of people out on a Saturday night, but we didn’t see any “light shows”. We did go to Notre Dame and there was a huge line of people waiting to get in, but the line moved fast. Inside there was a concert going on so we found some seats and listened for a while. There was a group of singers singing a type of chants. It was very interesting and of course taking place inside Notre Dame! Kind of surreal!

Well, we walked through the crowds as long as we could stand it and then decided to take the Metro to the Place de la Concorde. It’s the spot 3 years ago where all the monuments were lit up. Nope—nothing going on there—not even any crowds. We were there right at 10pm and fulfilled one of Maridee’s wishes to see the Eiffel Tower at night. On the hour and the half-hour, the Eiffel Tower “turns on”. It is always lit up and it also has one of those lighthouse lights going around all night. But every half-hour, hundreds of small strobe lights go off for about a ten minute “show”.

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