This is all about what over time has become one of my worst nightmares while interacting in the Paris nightlife.
There are basically two way this nightmare can come to fruition, both of which have very similar symptoms, but very different outcomes.
First, there is the meetup, where some of your Parisian friends are already out in a bar, and you are in touch with them over some messaging system or another.
So to make things abundantly clear, you leave your house, and you have confirmed you are on your way to where your friends told you they are hanging out.
Usually when you are about ten minutes or less away from arriving at the place a new message will arrive, informing you that they have just switched bars, and that most definitely means that you now need to go the opposite direction of the one you were walking in to redirect yourself to the new place.
There is not real limit to how many times this same thing will then happen over again, at least no limit I have ever found, but it then all kind of hangs on how much patience you have with this before just giving up.
That is, unless the next message is the dread: "We've gone home, where were you?"
The other version of this situation is probably even worse, in my eyes, and occurs when you have actually already met up with your friends, and one or more decide that the current place is not the place to be, but oh lucky us, they know of some magical unicorn bar, just about ten minutes away from here, which we could easily walk to, and for sure is still open.
The ten minute walk turns into fifteen before they all walk into a corner store and buy beers to drink while walking, and quickly turns into twenty minutes or more before I start asking if we are getting close because it is either cold, or worse, my buzz is fading.
Obviously when we finally arrive the bar is either closed, boarded up altogether, or in any other way inaccessible, because it has to be.
That is when the cycle starts all over again, and we will spend the rest of the night following any random person's idea of what a good bar is to go, preferably a long walk away.
Meanwhile, you as a Paris outsider, are left wondering why we don't just enter any of the great looking bars along the way, totally alive with nice looking people.
Sure, there are worse places in the world to walk around of course, because it does get super beautiful in the city at night.
I don't know, I think they just really like walking...
