pieces of paris - at night

i'm gonna let you in on a little secret. i'm 28 years old. and i have the night time habits of a 45 year old. as soon as it gets remotely dark i like to curl up in my bed under the covers with a good magazine or a mindless tv show (the office on repeat please). like a vampire in reverse - as soon as i see that sun go down it's like my body forces me indoors until the light returns again. and yes, nick is the same way, which works very well for us.

so another random phenomenon is the sunlight in paris. for a while we thought we might be in alaska and wondered if that sun would ever go down. it doesn't even really get "dusk" until about 9pm or thereafter. which was insanely difficult for us to handle. after a long day of sightseeing and approximately 10-15 miles of walking we were ready to retreat to the hotel for the night. but the fact that the sun wouldn't go down really bothered us. it made us think we were missing out on something (which i'm sure we were) and solidified that we are extremely UNCOOL. and i mean - we are in PARIS - shouldn't we be up all night dancing til' dawn or something? omg i'm tired just thinking about it.

point of the story is - we only successfully stayed up and out until the sun was completely down and gone one time while over there. but we were dead set on seeing that eiffel tower lit up at night. so after a very long day of walking, in the pouring day rain, we headed towards the base on a mission. a girlfriend of mine had told me one of the MUST do's in paris is to grab a bottle of wine, cheese and bread and picnic in front of the tower watching the lights come on. I'M IN. i was pumped. that sounds like a fairy tale and i want a chapter of it all to myself. so we walked, and googled, and app'd our way in about a 20 block radius of the tower. looking, searching, arguing (it says 2 km down that street!!!) wandering to find any type of "market" or grocery to get those supplies from. each time we went into a little shop and in broken french asked for "wine to go" they'd look at us in disgust and say "take away? non." finallllllyyyyy we found a very very nice french man in a cute restaurant (that was empty at 9pm) who said he could give us two cheeseburgers and sell us a bottle of wine from his bar. it CRACKED us up. he didn't let us look at his menu or anything - just saw we were american and said "i give you two cheeseburgers." and you know what? that burger was AMAZING. i don't know if it was the fact that it was 10pm and we were tired and starving but victory never tasted so good. so we took our 'take away' burgers and our janky bottle of wine in a black plastic bag and sat at the foot of the eiffel tower. sipping, giggling and enjoying the lights show.