There are a ton of perks to living in Europe, as you can imagine. One of the biggest ones for us is the fact that my family lives so close. Therefore, when my cousin, Olia, who lives in Paris, mentioned that she was planning throwing a birthday party for her 30th birthday on a boat, I jumped on the opportunity to go see her. Olia is Katia’s younger sister. She’s been living in Paris for the last ten years, married to a French guy, Christophe, and has two adorable children. The big event for Olia this year was her accepting one of the positions with Chanel. She specializes in selling merchandise to buyers from all Russian/Ukrainian speakers. And she is doing quite well, I must say.
So, on Friday, Nov. 30th, thanks to a couple of my new friends, I was able to leave for Paris before Robert came home from work. One friend picked up Mark from his preschool at noon, and another friend took care of my big kids after school.
My train was scheduled to depart at noon from Huntingdon Station that is 15 minute drive from our house. As Robert (on his lunch break) and I entered the station we saw announcements about all trains stopped and cancelled until at least 12:30 because a person was hit down south, between Huntingdon and London. I panicked a bit…how was I supposed to get to King’s Cross and get on Eurostar? The lady at the counter was going to have me take the taxi that would get me to the place south of the accident and closer to London. Then she told us to drive ourselves if we have a car. We said we did have a car (it was a thirty minute drive) and ran back to the parking lot. As we were already pulling out of our parking spot, that same lady comes running out of the building pointing to the train stopped on the first platform, saying that that train is heading to London and leaving right away suddenly. I RAN with my suitcase straight into the train, a bit apprehensive whether or not the train for real was going to London. The moment I got into the train car, the doors slammed behind me.
I am sure you are waiting for an interesting twist in my story or some sort of an adventurous ending. But no, the train went straight to London, and by “straight” I mean, it did not stop at all. I was at King’s Cross in 40 minutes, instead of an hour, found hundreds of people standing in front of the timetable display with many “delayed” and “cancelled” signs opposite to their train numbers. I found my way over to St. Pancras, a Eurostar train station, got through Passport control, again realized how much people from mainland Europe don’t really care if you enter into France/Belgium/whatever and how much the Britts do, bought some Cadbury chocolate and finally boarded the train. It was no Shinkansen by any means, but nevertheless a very comfortable and quick ride. Three hours later, I was in Paris!
I stayed at Olia’s house, in one of the districts of Paris that is considered more residential, not touristy and just very pretty in a French way. To get to her house I had to take RER, sort of like a suburban train. For some reason, I had a more difficult time navigating Paris train/subway system than I did Tokyo one! People seemed to be helpful…even though I had maybe three phrases in French memorized and one of them was “Do you speak English?”. Yeah…not very prepared.
On Saturday morning, Olia took me out to Opera district to the mall type place with fancy brands called Galleries Lafayette.
It was a very busy pre-Christmas Saturday morning. Tons of shopping to do, tons of famous brands counters all around. Of course, we visited Chanel. And now I actually know what “Classic Chanel bag” means.
Very festive all around.
After a delicious lunch at a very extravagant place at this Lafayette, we had to run home so we could have enough time to get ready for the big party. On the way, we snapped a couple of pictures by the famous Opera House. What? You cannot find me in the crowd?…I know, it was tough to catch a moment with no one in the background.
Busy streets of Paris. The touristy part.
Residential part of Paris. We are trying to get home.
We had a couple of hours to get ready, so we had to rush. We were still missing Katia, Olia’s sister. She was on the train coming from Brussels from a business conference and we were hoping she would get in on time. It all worked out at the end, so I won’t go into details how we had to pick up Katia somewhere by the subway stop with all her luggage. Have her jump in the back and change into her dress on the way to the boat. It was crazy!
And guess what! That was not even the craziest part! As Christophe dropped us off by the river, he told Olia (in French) to walk across the bridge and get to the boat right away as we only had 5-10 minutes to spare. Somehow (maybe lost in translation)
Olia started leading us to the right of the bridge (Alexander’s bridge, right by the Eiffel Tower). At first we walked briskly, then we started jogging (well, however much you can jog in an evening dress), then we started to panic asking people about our boat. After we ran about half a kilometer in the wrong direction, Olia realized we have to go back to the bridge, cross it and then find our boat there. Her guests were already calling her from the boat (Christophe was already there as well) telling her that the boat was just about to depart. You can only imagine what three of us looked like running in our high heels and fancy dresses, across the bridge, hoping that the boat wouldn’t leave without our birthday girl. My shoes turned out to be too big for running, so at some point, I took them off and just ran without them—my feet were freezing but it was so easy to run!-haha. Okay, FINALLY, all sweaty and breathless we made it to the boat and they closed the gate behind us. What a crazy adventure!
This is all of us at the party, except Katia who is taking the picture, unfortunately.
We had a delicious three course meal—a selection of yummy French appetizers, veal with mushrooms and potatoes as a main course, and another selection of French desserts at the end.
Oh yeah. Here is a picture of me and Katia, finally. We sat together at the party so we got to chat quite a bit.
Our birthday girl with a fancy cake and sparklers
And of course, who would miss an opportunity to take pictures with such a gorgeous view!
The photographer from the boat took a whole bunch of group pictures, but we did not want to buy all of them. This is a picture of a picture for you. Yes, that is my nail in the bottom right corner, pardon.
At around 9 pm, the boat came back to the place where it started. It turned out that our party was just starting after all. Someone told someone that Vladimir, Christophe’s and Olia’s friend, was throwing a Paris Ball at a place nearby. So understandably most everyone from the party decided to try to get in there as well.
Before I move on, I have to tell you that my role through out the evening was to guard the Classic Chanel Purse and its belongings. I guess the fact that we needed a place to put our documents, money and make up was a good excuse for me to carry this bag. Seriously, if you know how much this bag costs, you know what I am talking about.
We got a chance to see some beautiful view of Paris at night. Notice the bag.
When we showed up to the place where the Ball was happening, we were told that the dance part of the Ball wouldn’t start until 11 pm. (ELEVEN!) I know that I am getting older because I can never imagine myself going out and party at 11 pm on regular days. But I guess this was a very irregular day already. So who cares? To kill some time we went next door’s hotel where there was a place to sit, eat, drink and talk.
And finally, here is a picture of some of us right before the Ball (I didn’t even know what to expect). We were definitely underdressed, although the bag made everyone look fancier-haha.
Vladimir, the guy who was in charge of the party, added all nine of us to the list. Well, for regular people like me that just meant he got us in for free. But in the elite circles of Paris that just meant we were added to his invitees list, but we still had to pay. We figured out that quickly by the cashier tables. The ticket for the dancing part only was 70 Euros. Katia and I swallowed hard and did not really know if it was worth going at all. It was also very awkward to say “no” to Vladimir after he did us a favor by adding us to his “allowed” list. Thankfully, Christophe decided to just pay for most of us, which was incredibly generous. We all appreciated the gesture as we all wanted to see what this fancy ball is all about.
And this is what it was about—fancy dresses, brand name purses, drinks, lots of dancing and socializing. We did not stay long, but the girls definitely had a ton of fun dancing.
This is all us, girls who were mixing with the elite people of Paris
Finally, at about 12:30 am, we left the party and headed home. Who knew that traffic jams exist in Paris even at one in the morning!!!? We won’t talk about our drive back home, that’s a story for another time.
Thus, the grand party was incredibly successful. Everyone enjoyed the food, company and all the excitement surrounding all the venues where we partied. Glamour is not my thing, that is for sure, but it was so interesting to see so many people who live and breath this extravagant life of expensive clothes and elite friends. Nevertheless, who am I to judge?
There is so much I do not know and cannot see in the life of those people.
On Sunday morning, we had just a couple of hours for me and Katia to go walk around Paris. Well, it turned out that most of those hours, we spent in a subway train…It took longer than we hoped for to get to Montparnasse. So we only had time to take this picture:
I am not really showing you the building, I am showing off my manicure
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And we had time to eat a pot of mussels at our “regular” restaurant Leon de Bruxells. Very yummy and so filling….Not every day can I stomach 800 grams of mussels.
That’s the place.
We rushed back home to Olia’s, grabbed my suitcase, said goodbye to Amelia (and unfortunately forgot to take pictures with Maxim who was napping at the time) and left for London.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. I got back to Huntingdon at 8:30 pm, welcomed by warm kisses of Robert and the kids, all wearing pajamas already, ready for bed. Clarification—Robert was NOT wearing his pajamas yet.
I was happy to be home, and so grateful for the opportunity I had to go party with family in such a fabulous place as Paris. Maybe next time we’ll actually do some sightseeing.
