Vendredi soir

Stage 1: Perusing Near Eastern antiquities at the Louvre with Saul and Keith (free youth night). I tried really hard to offer what little knowledge I have of the archaeology of Iran, Iraq etc. without coming off as a know-it-all. I might have gone a bit far when I started quizzing Saul on my explanation of the origins of cuneiform. Incidentally, he did not pass.

Stage 2: Pasta and tequila chez moi. In a blind taste test all three of us preferred presumably crappy 10 euro tequila to presumably superior 50 dollar tequila (the latter a generous gift from a friend who had visited). I find this incredibly perplexing and shameful. Though it's nice to know my 10 euro tequila is palatable, it's distressing to find my palate is not nearly as discerning as I'd hoped. We controlled for a variety of factors--salt, lime, sipping versus shooting--the results were consisted across the board. If nothing else, the rigorous nature of this test did produce sufficient inebriation.
Quote of the night:
Keith- "Hey, are your roommate and his friend gay?"
Me- "No. What makes you think they're gay?"
Keith- "Hm, I guess it's mostly the way they were dressed. Come to think of it, I don't know if I'd be able to distinguish a gay French guy from a straight one."

Stage 3: Party at cité universitaire, the campus for international students in southern Paris. Each country essentially has a dorm, it's sort of like a bizarre combination of Epcot center and the Greek row at your average American university. As we wandered around looking for the party the conversation went something like:
Me- "Where the hell is this party?"
Saul- "The text message I got says it's at the American dorm."
Keith- "Well that's Canada and that's Germany. I think America is somewhere over here."
Me- "Man, it's a small world after all."

OK fine, I didn't actually think to say that at the time, but I wish I had...

Stage 4: The long trek home. The party ended abruptly and inconveniently at 4am. The Paris metro is closed from 12:30-5:30am so it really would have been nice if the party had lasted a measly hour and a half longer. Cité universitaire isn't all that far from where I live, but I had to hop on a night bus that went up to central Paris in order to catch another night bus that went down to my neighborhood in the 15th. I fell asleep on the second bus and woke up in time to find myself in Boulogne, sufficiently past where I was supposed to have gotten off. To add insult to injury it was raining. By this point it was almost 5:30 so I decided to take the metro home, which required three line changes. I finally got home at 6am drenched, exhausted, and my belly still full of an odd mix of high and low quality tequilas.