With long overdue, Happy New Year to all of you. Let’s hope that 2012 will be great, prosperous and bountiful for us all.
I’ve found myself celebrating the turn of the year in Paris several times – including the Silver Millennium, the turn of the century.
But the last time I celebrated New Year’s Eve in Paris was in 2005, though, at some friends’ place. And it felt like a million years ago.
And this time, we celebrated it with an apéro at the apartment before going out to Champs-Élysées popping the champagne and celebrate together with the whole Paris (News said there were about 400,000 people there on New Year’s Eve).
So we started the day with a promenade in Paris, which ended with grocery shopping. We prepared ourselves the meals including the delicious foie gras and lots and lots of canapés. Smoked salmon, guacamole, tzatziki, bite-sized tomatoes, oven-fresh homemade cheese pastries, olives, cashew nuts, pecans, almonds and mini cucumber pickles, mini-blinis with salmon-crab tarama jam, with wines, obviously!
And then we went out in the cold, taking the metro to Arc-de-Triomphe/Étoile. During the night of 31 December to noon on 1 January, all public transports in Paris were free of charge. Even with its usual paying state the metros were almost always full, let alone when it’s free. All the trains were literally full to the max.
We were out a bit late, so time was tight and due to some perturbations in the metro line, we ended up celebrating the turn of the clock inside the metro. It was nonetheless charming!
And fortunately, J’s eldest brother brought champagne bottles inside his pocket, along with plastic cups (God bless him) so we had a toast and drank to the upcoming year 2012, in the metro, yes. Noisy and funny. We reached the Arch of Triumph about five minutes past midnight.
Then we poured out, along with gazillion other Parisians, into the Avenue de Champs-Élysées, everyone was toasting, drinking and laughing all the way.
It was BEAUTIFUL. Albeit the huge humongous crowd and a lot of drunkards. I most certainly will be back to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Paris in the future.
I was a bit drunk from bottoms-up champagne coupes unwell so after we took the metro to Châtelet everything was a bit hazy and very much blurry for me. I remember that we got in to a medieval bar and ordered some french fries, beer and sodas (really??) and that it was pretty much a rip-off (90 € for two trays of oily french fries, a jug of beer and some sodas? You’ve got to be kidding me. Well you’re not kidding, obviously – it’s PARIS!!!!!).
The next day, I was a zombie for the whole day. But Paris is unforgettable – a New Year’s Eve in Paris as well, even though age doesn’t lie I got exhausted from the cold weather and the almost-constant rain that poured over Paris all the time.
See you next Réveillon – in Tour Eiffel I hope! (Or better, at our own apartment in the 17th overlooking Gustave’s masterpiece, never say never!!)
Life in Knocked-Up Mode 
