In case you're not sure, Sacré Coeur is the cathedral at the top of the really big hill, and when you climb to the top of the hill to get to the cathedral, you look down onto all of Paris. It's a spectacular view, particularly at dusk on a clear night, when the Eiffel Tower has just been lit up. Also it's free.
So drinking a bottle of wine with your friends on these steps at night sounds like a great idea, right? It definitely sounded fun when Eloise invited me. How lovely, I thought. How Parisian! How bohemian of us!
Well. Eloise, Astral, Eloise's brother Angus, Astral's cousin Simone, and I arrived on the scene where apparently some concert had just ended. I had pictured clean, deserted steps with just us and our bottle of Johnnie Walker, but what we found was a decent sized crowd and steps absolutely covered in Heineken bottles, cigarette butts, and various snack wrappers. I wondered for a minute why exclusively Heineken bottles until I noticed the guys who were wandering up and down carrying 30 packs, and selling the individual beers, ball game style.
Relatively undeterred, we cleared off a cleanish space and cracked open the whiskey. Every now and then a Heineken bottle rolled down the steps and smashed. A large van with the words "Boom Bus" painted on the side rolled up below us. After some finagling, it eventually started playing dance music, and shooting out neon lights. Maybe seven people danced total, but it was fun. A little grubby but definitely cheap.
I couldn't help but notice, however, that the crowd was mostly dudes. Which meant that our largish group of girls (not including Angus of course) attracted a bit of attention. Some of them were nice enough I suppose, but there was one dude, wearing a Bulls cap, which is bizarrely trendy in Paris, who seemed ready to hang out all night. Bulls Cap Guy has a girlfriend in every country he's visited, if you'll believe that. Bulls Cap Guy believes that if you have a boyfriend in a different country, he doesn't count. Bulls Cap Guy believes putting your hands all over your new friend's thigh is just friendly, and why are you being so uptight, you frigid bitch? Bulls Cap Guy was also apparently unconcerned when his very drunk and very huge friend passed out immediately behind me. Sort of on me, actually.
"Um, is he okay?" I asked.
"Yes, yes. He just had too much to drink, you know."
Well sure. Once you've identified the cause of your friend's passing out, there's nothing else to worry about, right? So when a couple other guys approached the King Sized Sleeping Beauty behind me, I asked them if he was okay too. They gave me a weird look, which I didn't understand at all until a few moments later.
I felt Goliath stir behind me, and looked up to find him brandishing half a Heineken bottle, jagged edge up, at the two guys from before.
I'd like to pause here to remind everyone that this is all happening right in front of one of the most famous and beautiful cathedrals in the world.
Anyway, they started throwing punches and Bulls Cap Guy jumped up. They crashed into each other and then they crashed into us, and I felt a bottle smack the back of my head. As I registered the fact that I was just hit in the head with a goddamn beer bottle, with mixed feelings of rage and pride, I looked up to see that as they tumbled down the steps, they had somehow taken Eloise with them, rolling across the broken glass. I, very helpfully, yelled her name. But her brother was already there and pulling her out of the drunken, belligerent snowball.
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, the fight seemed to end somehow, and the last I saw of them they were stumbling away. And that's how we got rid of Bulls Hat Guy.
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