A small midnight moment.

"Do you see a man over there in the bushes?" asked my friend, pointing to a weird bundle in the dark park next to the Eiffel Tower. It was past midnight and we had been drinking extremely cheap wine to get us through the night,so seeing a man whispering into a buggy in the shadows didn't strike me as particularly odd. The moment I realised that the buggy had a melon instead of a baby in it was a slightly disconcerting one. Knowing that I would be out on the streets of Paris until the next day with nowhere to go was even more unsettling.

As a seasoned insomniac I had decided that spending a night in Paris without accommodation would be preferable to missing a day of my big adventure travelling on a sweaty coach. My first introduction to the city was rather underwhelming. Expecting to see the famously wide streets of Paris, I saw a car park. What followed was a long, lost walk in a random direction, slowly feeling the weight of my hefty backpack stick to me in the sun. Having wandered around aimlessly for a while, I decided to get on the Metro.

I wasn't sure where I was or how to buy tickets so I asked a man walking by, which ended up in an exchange of languages. Being incapable of pronouncing anything in French remotely more complicated than "Oui" and since his English failed to extend past the basics, we decided to communicate in broken German. Of course, no point of understanding was reached and the situation escalated to the moment where he was pushing me through some gates he had forced open, urging me to get on as "Everyone do it!". I had unwittingly committed my first felony, but I was so relieved to be going somewhere by train that I didn't even bat an eyelid when a random Parisian spent half the journey shouting at me in rapid French and pointing at my backpack. I just hoped it wasn't anything to do with me being sweaty and bedraggled as that wasn't about to change.

After dropping my bags off at the hostel for the night, I went out into the darkness. Paris at night is a cornucopia of lights and beauty. Walking past the Louvre I couldn't quite believe just how much space it took up. The ornate details looked glorious in the gloom and the Eiffel tower blinked merrily in the distance. I had never realised that the lights on the tower flash in some predetermined pattern. It was nice seeing something so beautiful simultaneously become tacky.
The night wasn't wholly eventful. But I will always see Paris as the city most beautiful in darkness.