Sometimes you need to have a pillow fight in the street

First of all, Saturday was an absolutely beautiful day here in Paris, and I spent a significant portion of it in my apartment writing a post about Cinque Terre, Italy.  I'm not complaining, but it just didn't feel right, so I was happy to learn that there was something weird and completely random to do in the afternoon.  I went to a massive public pillow fight that took place at Republique in Paris and was organized (according to its Facebook invite) by Flash Mob Party (Paris).

Before I go on, and I'm not sure if I mentioned this in my Dankerque post, but I absolutely hate crowds of people.  They are the worst, and I hate them, and I wish they would die.  I usually try to avoid them at all costs - I refuse to go shopping on the weekends, I don't really go to concerts, and I most definitely don't throw myself into a mob of people who are physically attacking each other.  However, as neurotic as I am about it, I am equally self-loathing because I did it anyway.

There's not much else to this story besides hundreds and hundreds of people smacking each other in the face with suspiciously hard pillows, but I would like to make one observation - the French love dressing up. After Dankerque and this event where people dressed up for literally no reason, I have realized that the French are just into it.  I wish I was some intellectual psychologist who could make some assumption like "so much is demanded from French society that its people like to defy cultural norms with costumes."  However, I have no idea what I am talking about.

Hitting people with pillows got old pretty fast for me, especially when I started assuming that people took personal offense to my face, and that's why they wanted to hit me so hard.  I personally just didn't feel the need to attack anyone, so the fight was pretty one-sided.