So I did something crazy: I stayed up all night in Paris for Nuit Blanche, an annual arts festival on the first Saturday of October that goes from 7 pm to 7 am. It was probably one of the happiest nights of my life: wandering through Paris at night looking for art, sipping wine and eating crêpes, discovering the surprises within each exhibit. I felt young and bubbly and excited with the energy of the whole city surrounding me.

I didn’t take very many quality photos, but I guess that’s how you know I had a good time 😉

We started the night around 7:30 with a mouthwatering street kebab, and our first stop was an exhibition in Le Marais that turned out to be a giant glowing eye floating in the air above a pool of water. Afterwards we listened to a beautiful musical performance in a church– the pianist was so talented, and it felt incredibly special to listen to such amazing music live.

We people-watched in front of the Pompidou with bottles of wine and hot, sugary crêpes; it was cool and damp and the perfect autumn night. There was a cathedral nearby that had an insanely trippy light show inside, and now I know that having a rave inside a church is a wholly doable event.

We saw so many pop-up installations during Nuit Blanche, from moving words you could follow like foot steps to dozens of silver dancers performing in a square of glitter. We stopped in at a random brasserie for coffee around 3 in the morning where we watched some truly entertaining karaoke. I saw the Notre Dame in complete darkness, with no one around. There was a giant sculpture of the word “Batman” across the river, and a documentary in a park about landfills. It was a bizarre string of exhibitions, but it was fun, and we never knew what we were about to encounter.

Even though the night was supposed to last until 7, it was pretty dead by 4. The last few hours consisted of a lot of nighttime walking trying to find open exhibits, and even though our efforts were frustrated at times it was cool to see the city quiet and calm, without throngs of tourists in every other street.

Our bus left at 9 in the morning, and sadly, we couldn’t find any breakfast places open that morning. We should have known: it was Sunday in France, after all. But it was Paris, the biggest city in France, and we couldn’t even find so much as an open Starbucks at 6 or a McDonalds at 7! I never realized how much I missed American diners until that moment.

By the time we got back to Reims, I had been awake for about 27 hours! At that point I was totally numb to all feeling. I knew that my contacts were dry, and that my feet ached, and that I was dehydrated and hungry and tired, but I think my nerve-endings had given up on trying to make me feel anything. But after eating lunch and showering and taking a long afternoon nap, I felt like a new person.

I wouldn’t trade the tiredness for anything, though, because it was all part of the experience. The wild, artsy, fabulously fun experience that is Nuit Blanche.