Getting There is Half the Fun

Sciences Po organizes a few trips each semester to its other campuses around France. Myself and the roomies figured these trips would be pretty lame considering the Frenchies don’t like to get “American crazy.” I wouldn’t choose a campus visit over traveling to London or Barcelona, but considering the super low prices of these trips and the all inclusive activities they provide, they’re a good deal. A few small French provincial towns came and went and then it was time for Sciences Po to visit their campus in the south of France. SIGN ME UP! Well I did sign up, but got on the waiting list. And much to my surprise, I got a spot along with Renata just a week before the trip!! Score! But I would soon learn these last minute changes and plans would become the theme of this trip.. They joked all weekend that 8:00 in Menton means 8:30. Sounds like The South to me, always moving a bit slower.

Our train from Paris to Nice to Menton was leaving early Friday morning, but since it was Renata’s 22nd birthday weekend, she wanted to start the festivities Thursday night. There is a club called Duplex, which I highly recommend, that is free for students on Thursday nights before 12:30 a.m. It is right next to the Arc de Triomphe and even has a cosmic bowling alley among various rooms featuring different dance music! And it’s all free!! Except the drinks, of course, unless you’re a girl 🙂

The plan was to head to Duplex and leave by 12:30 a.m. so we could catch the last metro train home, get a few hours of sleep and catch our 7:45 a.m. train. Well with pregaming, the metro ride there and the long line, we didn’t even get in until nearly 12:30! But that’s okay, we had a brilliant idea! Who needs sleep? We would party at Duplex until the metro opened back up at 5:30, go home, grab our stuff and head for the train to Nice! Let me just say… brilliant.

We started losing energy around 3:30 a.m. Thank goodness they have bowling because right as we were about to throw a drink at the DJ for playing the same beat for 3 hours we escaped to the bowling alley to play a few games. While I’m not exactly the type of person you’d see featured on a site like https://skilledbowlers.com, my bowling skills are typically much better than they came off that night. Drunk bowling is hilarious… gutter balls galore. We returned to the main dance floor an hour later and spent our final hour laughing at the shwasted, sweaty crowd and singing to Aretha Franklin (yeah, I dunno?). We probably looked just as bad, oh well.

Renata and I dragged our sore high-heeled feet to the metro and made it back to the apartment just in time to run out the door and catch our train. We had bags full of junk food for the trip and hardly enough time to wash our faces or brush our teeth. Your welcome, Gare de Lyon. We ran to the giant departure board where we were told to meet and found other Sciences Po exchange students just as confused as us. Our train was leaving in 10 minutes and no one had seen our trip leader who had all of our tickets. Finally, he sends us a text message in French (remember I don’t even have a cell phone so luckily we were with a group who had phones and received the message) saying he was standing by the train with a red umbrella.

Um, we needed those tickets I just mentioned to even get to the train platform… Luckily one of the girls was able to get us past security so we could run for our train (no red umbrella in sight). We grabbed the tickets right in time to hop on the train as the doors were closing. One boy didn’t make it and had to pay double the cost of our entire trip to hop on the next train down to Nice. We didn’t even have time to validate our tickets, which is a big no-no. We were with a group though, so one of the train workers signed off on our tickets so we wouldn’t get a fine. I found my seat and spent the next 4 hours face down on the table asleep. I guess I do need sleep after all.

Bon voyage! xoxo.

-T

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