(pics From http://candysroom.freeservers.com/bruceweb213.html)
If you know us even a little bit, you’ll no doubt know about our Bruce Springsteen obsession. That we first got to know each other by comparing the 45’s that we’d bought to get the unreleased B-side tracks. That I (Mike) went to a concert in Melbourne instead of going to Angela’s birthday party – and that we’d both flown over from Wellington to Melbourne for this tour, and scored scalped tickets at the then-ridiculous sum of thirty quid each (it sounds a lot more in aussie dollars, and even more in kiwi!)
So, when we heard that Bruce was touring Europe in October 2002, we had to be there. It was a real whistlestop tour – seven dates, seven countries, two weeks. Including Wembley Arena. So at the minute that tickets came on sale, we hit the phones, the web, the wherever! But all to no avail. We didn’t even get onto the phone exchange, let alone get an engaged tone, let alone get into a phone queue. Angela had a frustrating time of getting almost fully through a more obscure website selling tickets, before it crumpled under the weight of people just before the visa validation step. Tickets were sold out within 35 minutes, and already appearing on auction sites for £250 and up. Disaster!
There’s quite a good website, http://www.badlands.co.uk, that runs tours for not too extortionate a price. So Angela hit them. These guys are a ‘claytons’ online operation – as in, you e-mail them with what you want, and they get back to you. They reckoned that they had tickets to the Paris concert, Monday 14 October, cover price €40 or £30 – with one night in a £35 Ibis Hotel. For £120. A pretty hefty profit, but not stupidly hefty. So Angela sent them an order. And never heard back. Ah well.
In the meantime, Ron and Helen Bichan were firming up their plans for visiting us. They wanted to do a big trip around the Scottish Highlands and the Orkney Islands. Since Angela wasn’t working, she put her name into the hat for the trip. And an awesome trip it was too! We both resigned ourselves to our fate, and comforted ourselves in the knowledge that Bruce was back in Spring for a much bigger European tour.
But then, about 2 weeks before the 14th of October, we got a letter in the mail. From Badlands! “Dear Mrs Gilbert, as requested we’ve reserved your tickets, booked your hotel, and taken payment off your credit card.” Aargh!! Angela was going to be about as far north as you can get in the United Kingdom on the 14th of October! There was just no way of getting from there to Paris in a reasonable time. It was a choice between Bruce, or a fascinating and eventful 3 week holiday. But what if we couldn’t get our money back?
I was quietly thinking, £240 was not too much to pay for a Bruce Springsteen concert and a weekend in Paris to boot.
But it all worked out. I rang my mate Mike – Harun Michael, who we know through Greg. And through rugby – he’s one of the 14 punters going to see the All Blacks thrash the hapless English in November. And we knew that he was as much of a Bruce Springsteen fan as we were. So what would it be, Mike – £120, plus Eurostar tickets, plus another 2 nights in a Paris hotel, plus a day off work… to see Bruce Springsteen? To Mike’s credit, he didn’t say ‘yes’ straight away. He said he’d see how the finances would work out, and he’d ring me back. Which he did. After about 120 seconds or so…
The Badlands people were happy to change the name on the ticket, with the only proviso being that we’d probably have to share a double bed, since that’s what we had booked! Then I booked the Eurostar to leave on Saturday lunchtime, and return very early Tuesday morning. The plan was to have a weekend in Paris, go to the concert Monday night, and then get back to London in time for work on Tuesday morning.
Since the Badlands hotel was fully double the price of Hotel Saint Pierre, our favourite family-run Montmatre hotel, I gave Hotel Sainte Pierre a ring and booked the Saturday night and the Sunday night with them. This is always something I approach with a little bit of dread. My French has got very rusty since those heady days of playing boule on sand that our mad French teacher had piled on the carpet at Alliance Française, in Wellington. It seems to come back a little bit when I actually go to France, but a cold phone call to Paris to book a room is a nightmare. So with a little trepidation, I picked up the phone. And got the maid. Who was Spanish. When she came up with, "Parlez-vous en Espagnol, s’il vous plait Monsieur?" I realised that my booking was a bit of a lost cause. I think she spoke about as much French as I did. But not to worry, I got the Manageress later in the day and she was very helpful – and easy to understand, and I even got away with a little bit of conversation. All sorted!
Saturday morning, I headed off to Waterloo International train station. I gave Mike a quick ring from the station, since my keenness meant I was quite early. And just as well. Mike was still in bed! He’d got the departure time and the arrival times mixed up. I had the Eurostar tickets but he had the concert tickets! So our adventure nearly ended there and then if not for my call.
After a hurried pack, Mike arrived, in plenty of time. We jumped on the train and headed off, along with the Spunk Tour group, a Japanese company who unfortunately took the lowest translator’s quote when they decided on their logo.
After an uneventful 300km/h ride, we arrived at Gare Du Nord late afternoon. A quick twenty minute walk to Montmatre – which should have been more like five minutes, but I headed us off completely in the wrong direction at first – and we arrived at Hotel Sainte Pierre. Alas, in spite of our booking pour un chamber avec deux lits petits, the Manager did not have a twin room for us. A double room was the best he can do. I have a feeling that he doesn’t talk to his wife very much! But I was all prepared – after the potential for the Badlands hotel to be a double bed, I’d come with my sleeping bag all packed. In the end we got a twin room on the Monday night, but I’m glad I brought the sleeping bag!
This was Mike’s first time in Paris, so after we’d dumped our stuff, I took him on a walk through Montmatre – just about my favourite wee bit of Paris, and nice and close to the hotel. We went up to Sacre Coeur and looked at the view, then wended our way across and back down the hill through Abbesses, narrowly missing Pigalle…! Then we wandered back up into Abbesses for dinner. We found a nice looking restaurant about 8:00, that was completely full but a table freed up within a couple of minutes of us arriving. Which was lucky – within about 5 minutes, a queue built up that quite quickly was going out the door and into the street. Obviously a popular place! Since we were crammed in, we were almost sharing a table with a 4-place table (there was all of about a 2cm gap between us) so we chatted briefly to the people beside us – firstly a French family, and then another family speaking a strange, unrecognisable but vaguely Dutch/Flemish sounding tongue. So I asked them (in English) where they were from – Holland, perhaps? Turned out they were from Switzerland, and were speaking Swiss German. Now, I’d had a glass of wine by now, and of course I am completely fluent in German whenever I have had something to drink. But I couldn’t recognise a word these people were saying – or even hear anything vaguely German about their language. No, I did get one word – just one. When the meals arrived, one of them pointed to his steak and pronounced it Verrucht (mad!). Suissedeutsch is really different to German German, unlike Swiss French which is probably closer to French than US English is to British English.
After dinner we wandered around the café/bars that were around and about, and ended up in an allegedly Japanese bar (exactly in what way it was Japanese, other than the sign out front, we couldn’t work out at all. It was just like every other bar on the street). And we got chatting to the locals. Well, one local and lots of foreigners (though most of them were living in Paris, not tourists). Remember my blundering conversation with the Spanish maid? Well, worse was to come. I got talking (in French) to a Portuguese bloke, who spoke a little bit more French than the maid, but with the weirdest, strangest accent I’d ever heard. But I did okay I think. I figured out that he was working in Paris as a bus conductor, that he liked to go hunting Boar in the forest near his home town in Portugal, that you could use dogs to hunt but it was a little bit dangerous to do that sort of close-up hunting, and that he had a pit-bull in Paris that had already killed four people but was only dangerous if you went into its territory (I think – hope! – that our communication had broken down by this point!!). Then we got talking to a couple of Irish girls, one of them’s black French boyfriend Val, and Jim, a fellow tourist hanger-on from Boston. Now Jim was – and I’m really not exaggerating here – The World’s Most Stupid Man. He had no clue. None. He was one of these people that no matter how hard you try, you end up teasing. For example, at one stage he was leaning against a wall… for quite some time… until he ended up asking us to please free him because he’d managed to hook his trouser belt onto a door handle behind him, and couldn’t get free!! And it was all downhill from there.
So, after a night of fun, chatting and Jim, we headed back to our hotel at about 5am. Our Host let us back in – hmm, I think we woke him up!! Oops – and it was off to our cosy double bed. Lucky about the sleeping bag ay?
Sunday dawned a little too early and a little too soon. But we were in Paris! So we had to explore. Of course, one of the most important things you can do in Paris is to sit in a little café and drink espressos and eat croissants for breakfast, so the morning’s tourist activities were not too hard. But first we needed to move rooms, since they had a twin room for us for the Sunday night. And we got room 30! Which is the room that Angela and I end up staying in every single time we go to Paris. It’s got two single beds that are usually pushed together and made up as a double, but of course were separated out for Mike and me. I’m starting to suspect that they don’t actually have very many rooms, if we get the same one every time we stay.
So after a little coffee we headed into the city. We had to do all the touristy things – Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysses, and the Louvre (the outside of it). (I’ve never yet made it into the Louvre – the place’s sheer scale always means that we feel that we don’t have the time to do it anything like justice. One day…). Interspersed with coffee and food. The French do coffee, particularly espresso, like nobody else, arguably even including the Italians and the Americans. It doesn’t strike me as particularly hard to buy the right beans and then force the water through them in the right way – but for some reason the French have it down pat, and nobody else comes close. Maybe it’s the ambience associated with the whole French coffee experience, but I don’t think so – my first post-Paris espresso in the Mayfair Pizza Express was a sore disappointment. They’re only worth drinking in France.
By now it was getting late. The walk down the Champs Elysses from Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre is surprisingly long. So we hopped onto the Metro and headed to the other ‘been there done that got the t-shirt’ place, the Eiffel Tower. I hadn’t been up the Eiffel tower for a few years, having been there and done that and got the t-shirt the first time we visited Paris. I was pleasantly surprised. Most phallic high things are generally of the ‘go to the top, stare aimlessly at the view, go back’ variety. But we bought the walking ticket (less queues and cheaper than the lift ticket) and the walk up the structure was a fascinating one. First of all, you’re in amongst the steel and iron – it feels like being a flea inside a watch or something like that. It’s all so big! And on every landing, they had a little plaque with a little ‘Eiffel tower’ story – little vignettes such as the first person to fly a balloon over the tower, first broadcasts from the tower (to Paris, to England, to America…), other famous aviators using the tower as a navigation point, crazy Frenchmen climbing it to hoist the tricoleur during the war, and so on. Then on the three main levels, there were all sorts of other things to see and do. And of course the view! The view is different from the three levels, and you have to stop and look at it each time. Plus because it was getting late, and it was winter, we timed it just right to get sun, dusk and finally night views. All in all we were there for the best part of a couple of hours.
Next on our itinerary was a Badlands warm-up party. We had an address ("café les autres") and a time (8pm) so we thought we’d bowl along and see what all the other Bruce Springsteen fans looked like. It was also in the southeast part of Paris which I’d never been to before (admittedly because there isn’t much there – but a chance to see non-touristy bits of a city are always good). But, alas, the party wasn’t up to much. First of all the venue was far too small – there were probably 200-300 people packed into a café/bar that would comfortably fit maybe 50, and spilling out into the street outside. There was a bloke on an acoustic guitar doing Bruce covers, and in a little intimate bar he would have been quite good – but not enough volume to play to 300 people, most of whom were in the street outside and couldn’t hear much of anything. We stood around for a little bit with the other knots of people awkwardly standing outside. It seemed more like a wake than a build-up to a once-in-a-lifetime concert! So pretty soon we decided to check out the local restaurants and go back to see if things were going to get better – either more lively, or if half the crowd got sick of it and left. We found a little Chinese restaurant that had a little chilled deli type arrangement of Chinese meals, and was spooning them onto plates and then microwaving them to order. That sounds pretty gross I know, but it was actually very good food. Bet’ya that’s what most of them do – just out back so you can’t see how well prepared and kept they are. And it’s got to be better than the other way of doing it, which is to keep the food just above blood temperature instead of chilled.
So after a pretty good Chinese, we wandered back. It was all the same. Only maybe the crowd outside looked a bit more awkward and a bit less lively. Nobody was smiling. So deciding discretion was the better part of valour, we headed home for an early night in preparation for the big one the next night.
Monday morning saw us up and away – we were moving out of the warm family atmosphere of Hotel Saint Pierre and into the corporate professionalism of Hotel Ibis Porte de Bercy. (Ibis hotels are the midrange chain of the Accor hotel group. You know the Formule 1 McHotels we keep going on about? Well, it goes Formule 1, then Etap, then Ibis, and finally Novotel). This hotel was way out near the outskirts of Paris, but only about a km from the stadium that Bruce was playing. Badlands had provided us a freebie Paris map, a map grid reference, an address and a nearest metro station. So off we headed. We got out of the metro station to find ourselves in amongst arterial roads, TGV train lines, and the main autoroute out of Paris and on to Lyon. Hmm. So we asked a friendly French local where we should go. He sent us off down a busy arterial road, and told us to turn left when we got to the second main intersection. Easy enough! So off we trotted. This road was a busy multi lane affair – think the London North Circular, or Mt Alexander Road in Melbourne, or the Old Hutt road in Wellington. (Or… er… no, they don’t have that many cars in Dunedin!). But it all went bad when we got to our intersection. It wasn’t really an intersection – it was a spaghetti of on ramps and off ramps and overbridges and underpasses, linking this arterial with the Lyon autoroute. The really annoying thing was that we could actually see the hotel by now, and there were even signs on the various offramps directing traffic to parking for it and its associated shopping mall. But on foot? Short of running across multi-lane ramps carrying open road speed traffic, and climbing over concrete barriers, and such like, we were out of luck. (Later, travelling by bus from the hotel, we found that we were literally about 20m from the hotel’s front door. So near and yet so far…)
So back we tracked. At this point our map’s limitations were becoming a bit more plain. Not only was it lacking in detail – the intersection we were trying to cut through was simply shown as a blob – but there was a big advertisement right over the precise point we wanted to get to. And since we were having to navigate around arterials, autoroutes and train lines, we needed something a bit better than that. But, we were trying to do two sides of a square to get where we were going, and we’d just done the bottom and right sides of the square. So we figured on heading back to the metro station, and doing the left and top sides of the square. This proved more successful. We found ourselves on the main street of a little absorbed village, with cheery signs pointing to where we wanted to go. However our map again let us down – we ended up overshooting the top side of the square (a bit tricky to judge where to go to wend through all the concrete). But we found a Novotel, so we wandered in to ask directions (since being a Novotel everybody would speak English, and being an Accor hotel they’d know where their sister hotels were). Surprisingly, nobody spoke English – I’m not being jingoistic by being surprised, more that if I was an English businessman paying a hundred quid a night to stay in a hotel, I’d expect English speaking staff for my money. (Or German, or Dutch businessman – English is the lingua franca in Europe, especially in the central or eastern European countries). But no matter, we got directions in the end and off we went. After wending our way through some side streets, and over a huge long foot bridge over about a hundred train tracks, we at last found ourselves at the hotel. What should have taken 15 minutes took us an hour and a half. Whew! A gentle suggestion to Badlands – next time, a better map and better directions would be appreciated. The grid reference we got for the hotel was just plain wrong which made things quite tricky!
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| Stunning Porte de Bercy - The panoramic views from our hotel window |
So off to lunch in the Porte De Bercy shopping mall. We had a choice of McDonalds, Q (the French equivalent), or a little chain steak restaurant type place. We both chose the set-meal of the Tartare de Boef with a starter, chips & salad, and dessert. This gave me the chance to learn a new, now very memorable phrase:
Excusez-moi, mon etranger stupide, vous connaissez que le Tartare est cru, oui?
You do know that you’re ordering the raw mince, don’t you?
Unfortunately at the time, I had no idea what our waiter was on about (he was speaking very quickly and with a funny accent – well, that’s my story!), so took the option of looking wise and comprehending, and smiling and nodding. Then I suddenly remembered what ‘cru’ meant, long after our order had been placed, but in time to go through the various emotions of trying to work out what we were going to do when this stuff turned up. Do a ‘Mr Bean’ and try and hide it in the pot plants? Not eat it and suffer the sneering of our waiter? Or just grin, carry on the sophisticated air that of course was what we were expecting, and tuck in with gusto? Well, we opted for the latter. When it arrived, we had the added bonus of a big raw egg yolk on top – so if the campylobacter didn’t get us then the salmonella would finish us off.
Turns out, if you kind of tried to forget what you were eating, it was very, very nice. The meat was absolutely top-notch, freshly ground and delicately flavoured, with seasonings and pickled things as extra flavourings. (All we needed was a grill and we’d have had the makings of a pretty good hamburger!) The tricky bit was forgetting that we were eating raw meat. Especially after I did the sums and figured out that the explosive vomiting should start just about in the second song of the night, this evening.
So having downed our Tartare de Boef, and now feeling psychosomatically a bit queasy, we wandered around the rest of the shopping mall for a couple of hours. To be honest there wasn’t much to see. A Virgin megastore that was more milli than mega, but had a few CDs and DVDs to look at … a couple of knick-knack type shops with stuff where price made up for taste … well, that was about it really.
Finally we went back to our room and surfed the TV for a bit while we got ready. As usual, the best thing on the 10 or so channels we had, was RTL the German channel. I already had this figured from past experience – in North London we had one French channel, TV5, and one German channel, RTL. One for me and one for Angela. But while RTL had a diet of dubbed Hollywood blockbusters, sports, talkshows, Grundy Soapies (who can forget that quality drama, "Guter Zeiter, Schlechter Zeiter"?!) and magazine current affairs type programmes, TV5 had a diet of elderly farmers driving tractors, earnest painters and potters talking about their contribution to culture, and dumpy presenters discussing the latest zero-rating French drama. So while the French channels had specials like “cheese makers’ weekly”, RTL had everybody’s favourite, "Der Bundes courte" – The Peoples’ Court. The German version. Trash TV at its finest! In tonight’s episode, a stepdaughter was trying to sue her (wicked) step-mother for providing an unsafe house (she nearly drowned in the swimming pool – something to do with a rake that I couldn’t follow but sounded pretty gory). Unfortunately my knowledge of German is quite specific and targeted, so the only other thing I could work out is that one of the defendants had been drinking heavily. Ah well, quality entertainment nonetheless.
So now it was time to go. We loaded ourselves onto the bus to the stadium – we had a bit of trouble figuring out the European method of paying your bus fare, until we remembered that the idea was that you just didn’t pay. After a short ride – going right through the junction we spent blundering around earlier in the day – we found ourselves at the stadium, quite early. What should we do for an hour or so? The answer immediately came up as we walked past a bar with Bruce’s latest album blaring at full volume from the PA. In we piled. This is what last night’s Badlands gig should have been like! After a couple of seize-cent-soixiante-quatres we wandered across the road and into the queue at 6pm. Now, this queue was moving slowly, but it was growing at a very fast pace – you actually had to walk quite quickly to join it, to keep pace with its tail! Once we were in it, people really started to pile onto the end of it. Lucky for us.
We got in about 40m from the stage, and managed to wiggle in to about 20m from the front, dead centre. And what an awesome gig it was. Why are we over this side of the world, riding smelly dirty tubes and paying NZD 12 for a sandwich and a coffee for lunch? This is why. There aren’t many places in the world you can have a weekend like this one.
Chatting to people around us, everybody was speaking English. Far as I could make out there were no French people at the gig at all. There were a sizeable number of people from North England and Scotland, but the majority would be Belgians, Dutch and Germans. All speaking English of course, even to each other (when in doubt about the other person’s nationality, just speak English – and if two Germans happened to be talking to each other, why switch back?). I don’t think that Bruce Springsteen is really to the French people’s taste. Other than Johnny Ideal and French Rap (which is probably France’s best contribution to the music scene) what have the French given the world? Nana Maskouri (even under her Luxembourg flag of convenience). The likes of Michael Boulton would probably get a fair crowd in France I reckon – not the likes of Bruce.
So buzzing after an awesome gig that went 10 minutes shy of three hours, we decided to walk back to our hotel (we figured we’d covered just about every road in the neighbourhood by then). We found a little café/bar on the way home, and grabbed a bite to eat and a couple of drinks. It was a nice wee bar with a very friendly proprietress, and some Tunisian types playing pool (the proprietress got a bit vocal when they sent the cue ball onto the concrete tile floor, which they did a fair number of times!). Still buzzing when we got back, we found the MotoGP on the TV, followed by a replay of another Bruce Springsteen concert! But eventually we had to admit defeat and go to sleep.
But not much sleep it was. After 3 hours sleep we were up at 5am for our train. We decided that blundering about looking for a metro train wasn’t the best approach so we splashed out on a taxi – a nice E-class Mercedes – back to Gare du Nord. A bite to eat at the station, another 2 hours sleep on the train, and I was groggily at work by 9:45am. I’d like to say that I had a productive day that day… but the pace had been too much for me and it was very difficult indeed to get through the day. (Me and Angela have done similar silly things before – the best one was probably a red-eye flight from New York, just in time to get the Tube from Heathrow straight into work the next morning) but this was A Night Without Sleep Too Far I think. Straight after work I was home, crawling into my bed, and slept about 14 hours.
This story has a post-script though. Bruce played Wembley Arena two weeks later, when Angela was back in London. So me, Angela, Mike and Mei all showed up there on the offchance we could get tickets, or to listen outside in the rain and the cold if not. We didn’t fancy our chances. Tickets had been trading on the internet for minimum £200, and up to £1000. There wasn’t any way there’d be any around the venue. We all got there late, too, because the tubes and trains were broken; and the weather was awful which meant a cold night listening to a faint bit of bass booming through the ground was going to be a pretty miserable one. But… the scalpers where there and either they’d overestimated demand, or everybody had decided like us that it was a hopeless task and stayed away. Tickets with a cover price of £45 + booking fee were going for £75, a pretty reasonable price if you ask me. So in we went for another awesome event. The irony is, if we’d have known we’d get to Wembley so easily, we probably wouldn’t have bothered getting ourselves to Paris. So everything worked out very well indeed.
Links
BadlandsCandy's Room - Set lists, pictures and links to more pictures
The official Bruce Springsteen tour site
All my pictures (index)
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