Le Tour de France

On Sunday I took the slow(er) train two and a half hours to Paris with a girl from my class, Sarah. We took the 7:07am so we could spend as much time as possible in Paris watching the end of the Tour de France. One of my sisters in SAI (International music fraternity for musicians) from UW-Madison is studying in Paris this month so we met her for brunch. Sarah and I took the métro and met her in an outdoor market where people were selling clothes, scarves, olives and whole roasted chickens. It smelled wonderful and made us hungry so we ate omlettes, fresh orange juice, tea and meringue pie at a nearby café. I was really glad I got to meet up with K.C. even though we go to school together and I see her multiple times a week through SAI activities, it was still really cool to see her in France!

Sarah and I got back on the metro to go to Les Champs-Elysées for the Tour. We walked up to L’Arc de Triomphe and took a ton of pictures. A parade started at 2pm, but it was just a lot of cars driving extremely fast. Some people had music blaring, but others were just semi-trucks swerving around in the road. Sarah said “the French do everything slow except their parades” which was true! Everyone does the swervy-walk thing where you try to pass them and they go the other way and run into you. You really have no choice but to walk slow also, or avoid people altogether. That is impossible in Paris so we were forced to walk slow. And this parade went by so fast! They were probably doing 50+ mph so you saw each vehicle for about one second. After the parade was over there was about an hour and a half without anything to watch so I kind of wished the parade would have been slower so it would have lasted longer.

They said to expect the first wave of cyclists to come through around 4pm so the half hour before that we were all craning our necks and straining to listen for the helicopter filming the race. Suddenly, cheering erupted down the Champs-Elysées and it traveled to us like “the wave”. We saw the cyclists! But it went by, again, too fast to see much so I still didn’t even know who was in the lead! We were too far away from the television and not near the speakers. They passed by eight times total so each time they went by us, we ran down a little bit further towards the big tv screen at the opposite end of the Arc de Triomphe. Then when we’d hear the helicopter coming, I’d stick my camera in the air and try to get a good picture. Everyone else did the same, though, so I got a lot of great pics of random hands. Near the end, everyone in the crowd was jumping and cheering as they showed the cyclists sprinting towards the finish on the big screen. It seemed like everyone else had the same idea, too, to push their way toward the screen, so it was just a huge sea of people jumping! Sort of like Jump Around at UW football games.

We got close enough to the screen to see that the winner was Australian, but we couldn’t read his name. We figured it out later, but it was pretty funny that we were watching it happen but still had no idea what really was going on because it was so crowded! I was so glad that we had come to Paris for the day because this experience might just be my favorite one of the trip.
We took another metro line to the Montparnasse train station where we had dinner as we waited for our train back to Tours. This time we took the TGV, a highspeed train, so it was only an hour long ride. Oh, and I tried escargots and liked them!