Day 26: Paris et le caveau de la Huchette

The trip to Paris from somewhere in France always signals to me the beginning of the end of a holiday.  The time seems to have raced by. 

We spent the morning tidying the apartment, taking the recycling and rubbish to the appropriate bins and doing a careful pack. 

Our train was a local one to Saint-Pierre des Corps which is the TGV stop in Tours.  We got there on time and then I saw on the arrivals and departures board that our train was delayed by 50 minutes.  I had an app which told me that they were doing some work on the rail lines between Tours and Bordeaux which meant they had to reroute the TGV and it had to go slower.  This doubled the effect because the TGV going to Bordeaux had also been slowed. 

Handbag dog

Instead of an hour wait we now had a two hour one.  We found a seat in a café where we had a bite to eat and filled in our time.  Whilst there, a woman engaged me in a brief conversation – initially in English and then when I said I wanted to practice in French she obliged.  It turned out she came from the Basque area and had an 11 year old daughter who was passionate about living in New Zealand for some reason I did not establish.  

Finally the train arrived and we found our seats.  We sat across from an older woman who had a handbag dog who at first barked furiously at Bev when she got into her seat. This caused much amusement around us.  He settled very quickly however and Bev exchanged photos of her dogs with the lady along with lots of smiles. 

We found our way to the same apartment we stayed in last year and were warmly welcomed by our host Pierre. 

Bev wanted to experience some more live music so I looked online at places Pierre had suggested and found that there was a famous place called Caveau de la Huchette.  As luck would have it, it had some music happening at 9pm called Blues in Paris.  It was our sort of thing, I thought!    Even better, you could just turn up without booking and pay a 13€ entry fee.

Three changes of  the Metro got us to the venue, which was a cavern in the very touristy area of the Latin Quarter, just across from Notre Dame.  It was quite crowded when we got there and at first we had difficulty seeing the band playing.  Nevertheless, the music was good and in time we managed to get a front row seat.  In addition to the great music, they had some highly proficient dancers doing old rock and roll style dancing.  One couple in particular were very good and it seemed that they might have been employed  to get people up dancing.  The young man in particular looked very out of place however, wearing a white shirt, black waistcoat and trousers.  Not so weird you might think, but it was more like ballroom dancing attire in contrast to the other dancers who were dressed quite casually.  Not only that, it looked like either he had shrunk or the clothes were about five sizes too big for him – a bit of a distraction but he had an obvious talent  and danced almost non stop with a variety of partners. 

Watching how well co-ordinated people were and their tricky moves was impressive.  Not only that, they were of all ages - men and women in their 60s as well as younger couples as young as  20 or 30 years.  The etiquette seemed to allow for regular swapping of dancing partners, however, there was one man who was clearly not so happy when the woman he was with started dancing with others.  She was also very good!  “People watching” was definitely as entertaining as the music.  We came to the conclusion that it was also a place skilled dancers came to show off their ability and it also had an element of competitiveness about it. 

Finally, close to midnight I started fading and it was time to head homeward.