I thought we would be the first to arrive. Heck! There was already a crowd of around 30 people sitting on the Champs de Mars, half of them playing Ultimate Frisbee. There was nobody I knew from previous travels and travelers-gatherings. I dropped the bag and jumped on the field to join the game.
 
More people kept on showing up. At 10pm, we were around a hundred. It was out of question to have everyone hosted by the hospitality community of Paris. We had to camp somewhere. Nobody felt like taking the train out so we decided to spend the night right here on the Champs de Mars, at the foot of the most amazing monument of Europe.
 
There was enough beer and wine around to keep me fueled until 3am. No problems so far except when I had to mediate between a Polish guy that was looking for weed and a parisian that was pissed-off that the Polish guy thought he was a dealer because he looked Arabic. The race issue is quite sensitive in France. One hour later they were both laying improvised lyrics on human beats and having good fun.
 
I slept from 3 to 5:30am when the cops woke us up. By the time I had removed the shit from my eyes, the unitedstater sleeping next to me had stood up and started to negotiate. I thought : "No! Not him!".
 
It is my opinion that the French people have little tolerance for strangers, and that it worsens significantly if the later is from the USA and if the former is a policeman. But actually, the USer kid spoke french quite well and positively impressed the cops with his language skills. By the time I got there, he was already explaining them the concept of 888. There were actually around 15 tents scattered on the lawn. The rest was sleeping on the floor, and sleeping well as my unconscious prayer had been granted.
 
"We'll put down the tents, wake up everyone. Don't worry. We are the kind of people that clean up after themselves." They left when the last tent was down and the lawn cleaned. We went back to sleep.
 
The next day was spent learning tricks from each other, exchanging stories. Hitch-hikers always have really cool stories to tell. It really took us the whole day. There was so much to be said. We actually did only half of what we had planned in the morning.
 
Around 2pm I went around asking for donations to buy food for everyone and left to the shop with 57€ in small change in my back pocket. The cashier at the shop loved it... And so it was: the people that gave me some cash never asked to see the receipt to check if I wasn't stealing from the community. People that didn't contribute took from the food and later provided something else. Some probably didn't contribute much for various reasons, some probably spent more than they consumed but could afford it. No questions asked.
 
A good friend that wants to stay anonymous very well summarized it: "Take what you need / Give what you want". Believe it or not, it worked. When the lights started dimming, the alcohol was already flowing.
 
It is my personal opinion that unless we recalibrate strongly the social philosophy of such events, we'll have to choose between stopping to attend or die young from liver disease. I don't have what it takes to go against the social pressure and I doubt many have. How about we make the next one drug-free?
 
When I went to bed, I noticed that there was 5 tents standing. I stayed there half a minute wondering if I should wake them all up hitler-style to have them all taken down before the cops show up again. I decided I was too tired, and that my popularity would be too seriously damaged. The hell with them.
 
Two hours later, the same cops woke us up, pretty pissed-off to have to repeat the same thing. It looked like all the French speakers were somewhere else so I negotiated again. "Clean everything, pull down the tents, and if we see you again, you all get fined". I translated to English, folded my stuff, grabbed a plastic bag and started to pick up the trash.
 
I had been picking stuff alone for a while (mumbling about why nobody was helping) when one of the cops, the one that looked furious, started walking towards me: "Hey you! stop what you're doing and come here!" What again! "This is unacceptable! You're not going to clean everything on your own! Why are they not helping you! If you clean one minute more, I'm fining everyone! Tell them that." Hmm, they do have some sense of justice after all...
 
So everyone suddenly found themselves on the lawn picking garbage and it was clean in a matter of minutes. To all the anarchists out there: If within such a crowd of free-thinkers, world-travelers, it takes a police order to have everyone to cooperate, just imagine at the scale of the human society. That is mostly populated with lazy followers, you will agree.
 
Once the tents were down we could go back to sleep; it might actually have saved all of us some hours of sleep if I had decided to have the tents pulled down before going to bed, another blink to my anti-authority readers.
 
And the Sunday morning took off lazily, and was follow by a lazy Sunday afternoon. I was a bit craving for action. The only collective actions were a big discussion (involving everyone that was still there) about a webplatform called "couchsurfing".
 
It's a hospitality network that started around the idea of sharing what we have and learning about other cultures but turns out to be a great business venture. As usual, the end-user have little hints about what is behind the nice looking webpage so we heard the testimonial of former volunteers. And of course, one very exciting meeting for next year's hitch-hiking week.
 
Be prepared for it. "789, the road is mine"
 
As people were slowly leaving, the group slowly shrinked, and then, it was suddenly over. I left with some others to another place in Paris but it would be off-topic to tell about it here. Over.