Taylor Swift

The day has come. Taylor Swift, the Eras Tour, the world’s biggest and highest grossing tour ever! Taylor has grossed over 1 billion dollars in ticket sales so far, and she literally just opened her European Tour in Paris on Thursday. Anyhow, that wouldn’t be until later today, so let’s start with what happened earlier in the day.

I tried going to bed around 1am local time and was twisting and turning in bed until the wee hours of the morning. My plan was to sleep for 3 hours, and wake up for the Canucks playoff game which would start at 4am Paris time. I didn’t end up getting any sleep, and ended up just getting out of bed at 4am to watch the game. I was obviously pretty tired, but I HAD to catch the game.

Sadly, we ended up losing, but not only losing, we lost in Overtime, which meant I had to stay up even longer. Ugh. I ended up strolling into bed around 7:15am local time.

The others were obviously fast asleep. I’m not even sure when they woke up in the morning, but Lisa came to wake me up at 11:40am, so I got a good 4.5 hours of sleep. It would hopefully be enough for the upcoming concert this very evening!

I quickly got ready, and we headed out for our 12:30pm reservation at a restaurant called Eunoe, a recommendation that came from Una. The food there was excellent, probably our best meal that we’ve had in Paris so far.

The food was excellent, a great recommendation from Una! The server was quite jovial and friendly as well. He mentioned to us that the place is normally bustling with locals\Parisians, but because this weekend is a long weekend for the French; they all head out of town. Lucky us, we were able to get a reservation for lunch. We actually had one for Sunday, but they cancelled the reservation due to some scheduled kitchen maintenance that they were doing that day. Becky ended up finding another reservation for today instead, and apparently, we were lucky to get it so last minute, for if it wasn’t a long weekend, we wouldn’t have gotten one.

After lunch, we went to a cafe to get some coffee and we took the metro back to our apartment. While walking back to the apartment, the girls bought a baguette and some cheese from a fromagerie.

Darren and Becky outside our apartment:

figured by the time we came back from the concert this evening, that we could have a late night snack, for we wouldn’t be having dinner. We got back to the apartment around 3:45pm, so we had some time to chill before we had to head out to concert venue, a 45-minute metro ride.

I ended up napping for about 45 minutes, before we headed out again to see Taylor! We left the house around 5:15pm, and embarked on our 45 minute metro ride to the arena. La Defence Arena. Here are our Taylor Swift bracelets that Isla made for us, Thank you Isla!

The metro ride was somewhat busy, but it wasn’t packed like I expected.

Once we got to La Defence area, we still had a 10 minute walk to the venue. The walk ended up being maybe 20 minutes, due to the crowd controlled pace of the line moving forward towards the arena.

We eventually got to security, picked up our VIP merchandise, headed to our gate, and we got to our seats just in time for the 6:30pm opening act, Paramore.

Taylor started right on time at 8pm. It was about to start!!!!!!! Darren isn’t too much of a Swifty. Becky and Lisa like her and know a lot of her songs, but I’m definitely the Swifty. LOL. Here are some clips from the concert:

She goes through each ‘era’ of her ablums, and sings a bunch of her songs from each one of those eras. 18 years of hits. It’s pretty amazing. The show itself was top notch. Amazing set and stage. Production value was A+, and of course her songs were great. She also introduced the ‘era’ from her latest album that was just released 3-4 weeks ago, The Tortured Poets Department where she sang 5-6 songs from that album. Fortnite being one of the songs from that album. She sang a couple of ‘surprise songs’ that weren’t on her set list. She normally has a few songs at every city. Those being ‘Hey Stephen’ and ‘Maroon’.

Everyone got these LED bracelets when we got in which light up and sync with the different songs. So cool.

She sang for 3 hours 13 minutes, as we started exiting the venue at 11:13pm. Quite the performance, and totally worth it. Ultimately it was an excuse to go to Europe and based on scalped ticket prices elsewhere in the world, it’s cheaper to fly out here, go to the concert than it would be for ticket prices back in North America.

Anyhow, I can check that one off the bucket list. I definitely feel fortunate and grateful for being able to do this. Talk about spoiled.

As we exited the venue, everybody piled back through a fairly narrow pathway to get to their transportation options. Shockingly, we got out of there and onto a metro with no hitch! We essentially hopped onto a train right away, and we were off. The train wasn’t even that packed. We were back to our apartment in 35 minutes. Talk about smooth.

We ended up having cheeses, sardines, charcuterie, and some dessert for a late-night dinner by the couch.

It was about 1:30am in the morning here, when I messaged one of my fellow coaches from Isla’s volleyball team. I asked Steve to stream the game for me live so I could watch it. Isla’s playing in the Volleyball BC club volleyball Provincials. The biggest and final tournament of the year. They’ll be competing against 25 other teams in the 12U age category to be the best team in BC.

Isla’s team is the ‘B’ team for her Air Attack club team. ‘B’ team because our girls were ‘drafted’ after the ‘A’ team coach made all of his picks. In essence, our girls were the ones that weren’t considered good enough for the first team. Our hope is that we finish ahead of them in this tournament. The game I’m watching below was their 4th game of the day, and they ended up winning it! It was a good start, the girls had 4 wins on this day, and will be playing in the quarter finals tomorrow!

That was our day today… until tomorrow!