Thinking ourselves clever we tried to book a restaurant next to the Eiffel tower only to be asked for a 300 Euro deposit for dinner. Per person.
Searching for something a little more budget friendly I exhausted my Lonely Planet for choices and scoured the internet. I finally found a resteraunt for 60 euros a plate and in a decent range of the Eiffel festivities.
The upside was the restaurant turned out to have a less expensive set menu for 35 euros that was not the 7 course New Year's eve special. We opted for this because 1. We wanted to finish dinner early to head to the Eiffel and 2. We (and our stomaches) still had vague memories of the other 7 course meal we had recently (Xmas).
The downside was that get what you pay for and I ended up getting two oysters as an appetizer (90 percent of the dish consisted of the uneditable shell, unediable salt pebbles, inediable seaweed, and oyster ice shreds which I didn't eat - on the right):
For my main course I ordered Gambas but it turned out to be just one big shrimp (I'm convinced the beady eye thing is laughing at me in the picture):
The chocolate cake for dessert and the live entertainment (the owners of the restaurant are also a paino/singer duo) weren't half bad this could be due to the fact that I was already drunk by this point (hey, I did have two oysters and a big shrimp for dinner, k?).
At 11 we headed to the Trocadero. Unforch so was everyone else so by the time we actually got close enough to the train to board it we were denied by the law of physics in which a body of mass can not occupy the same area as another 500 bodies of mass squeezed into a metro car. We got lucky by the 4th train when some unfortunate souls squeezed their way off the train.
Five arm-pitt filled "why the hell are you trying to hold on to the bar therefore pressing your arm against my face, falling is a luxury for those with space TO fall" metro stops later, we ended up at Trocadero only to get into the queue to get out of the metro.
At 11:50 we stepped out of the metro and into the mud and fog to view the Eiffel tower never before lights "spectacle" (read: the Eiffel tower turned different colors):
Then it kind of did this thing were the lights incrementally decreased from the top down and I guess the this was the countdown because then the Eiffel tower went into a blaze of white light:
Afterwards you heard scattered cries of "Happy New Year!" and popped champagne bottles (gotta love the absence of open liquor laws) throughout the crowd after everyone checked their watches (or cell phones) and figured that it was, in fact, new years (thank you confusing and unorganized France).
Then everyone kind of waited around for the Eiffel Tower to do something else. When it didn't the crowd started to thin out.
Cold, and ankle deep in mud we decided to walk to a further smaller metro while swigging champagne and dodging drunk people on the streets. It took us a total of 2 and half hours of metro transit time to get back to the hotel.
So yeah that was my New Years. Two and a half hours to consume 2 oysters and 1 shrimp, 15 minutes to watch the Eiffel tower change colors , and a total of almost 4 hours trying to get to the metro, on the metro, riding the metro, and finally off the metro.
90 percent crap kinda like my appetizer. C'est la vie.
Happy New Year.
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