Happy New Year!

Best. New Years. Ever.

Rock, Anthony and I messed around in Paris just to kill time on NYE.  We tried to go to the Louve, but it was closed.  Found out that it is free on Sunday, though!  Speaking of free-  All of the public transit was free for New Years, which was really nice, but made the metro a madhouse.  Anthony signed us all up for a pub crawl to welcome in the New Year.  We ate a HUGE dinner in Chinatown and Rock ordered for us in Chinese.  When the food came, the waitress brought Anthony and me a fork, spoon and knife and only brought Rock chopsticks. We got a kick out of that.  After dinner we met up with a girl in Anthony's study abroad program from L.A. named Melissa Liu and we took the metro to the Moulin Rouge, where we were meeting up with the organizers of the pub crawl around 8pm.  The group was way larger and a lot more fun than I expected!  It was almost exclusively foreigners, but not really many Americans.  There were a couple of marines from the states who came down on leave from Germany, but that's really it besides us.  We met and mingled with people from Germany, Slovenia, England, Scotland, Australia, Brazil, France, Ireland, China, Singapore, Costa Rica and probably other places that I don't remember.  At the first bar we got a free shot and jager bomb with the purchase of a specialty cocktail and after that it was just a free shot with each beer, glass of champagne or cocktail.  After the first bar, the 75 or so people on our pub crawl were split into three groups of around 25.  We were all on the "blue crew" which turned out to be the rowdiest of all the groups.  We started chants, sang songs and jeered the other groups as we passed them going from bar to bar.  All three groups met at a huge night club an hour before midnight.  There was a 30 meter (yup meter- i'm adjusting already) line to get into the club but all of us got to skip it and go in the VIP entrance.  The night club was already hopping and we had a blast bringing in the new year.  The only bad part was that Anthony's wallet was stolen from his jacket.  Luckily he took his credit cards out, but he did lose all of his french ID's, his American driver's license and some cash...  We left the club around 1 and went to a huuuuuuge apartment in a really nice part of the city.  We were invited by Joa, Elody and Alison- the French girls we had been out to the bars with the two previous nights.  By the time we got there, the party had died down to around 15 people, all French.  At first I got the feeling that we weren't really invited (and was actually told that by the host later, after we had become friends), but the girls told us to not worry about it and it turned out to be a blast.  We left around 7:30am...  At the party we mingled, spoke in broken english to french people, played a game that involved impressions of famous people, enjoyed some more cocktails, danced to American music and laughed a lot.  The host explained to us the finer aspects of a good, French cognac and made Anthony and me try two kinds that had aged over 20 years.  All-in-all, it was a great new years!