A Dwindling Mercurial High

After many unsuccessful attempts by myself and family members to obtain tickets to the US portion of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, we waited patiently until she announced European dates.  The announcement came sometime later that she would be playing shows in both Paris and Lyon, so we jumped at the chance to see if tickets would be easier to come by for those shows than for the US shows.  They would be put up for sale while we were still in the US (last spring, I think), so we set our alarms for 3:30am on the relevant day.  It worked!  I scored three tickets to the first Paris show, and Kate managed to get four to a show in Lyon about a month later.  (I had prepared myself logistically for the ticket sale, creating a ticketmaster.fr account, loading credit cards, etc., but had not bothered to make sure I knew all of the relevant ticket-buying vocabulary in French.  As soon as I got into the sale from the queue, I snapped up whatever tickets I could find, wondering what the unusual description of the seats meant.  Long story short, the tickets were in the mosh pit.)  

When Kate and Anna said that they would be coming over for the show in Lyon, I initially thought that I did not need to see two TS concerts in a month so would either sell the Paris tickets on the secondary market or give them away to friends.  I asked Glenn what he thought, and, to my surprise, he said, "I think we should go."  So, we went.  (We gave the third ticket to a graduate student at PSE who dog-sits for us.  He was sooooo excited!)

It was a fun, exciting, joyful event, remarkable in so many ways.  I am very happy we went.  

First, our tickets were great!  We were super close and got incomparable views at various times when Taylor walked over to our part of the stage.  We were also in a section full of people who were very excited to be there, which was fun.  (Maybe that would describe the whole arena?)  Our section also had its own merch line and beer/wine vendor, so that stuff worked remarkable well.  (We did have to stand for hours, though, and my back is still complaining a little several days later.)  

The music was, of course, fantastic.  She is such an extraordinary and prolific songwriter that there were many gems left out of even a three-hour non-stop performance, but the ones she included were great.  I felt like we missed out by not preparing for the possibility that she would include songs from The Tortured Poets Department.  She did, of course, and we were a little lost during that section.  (The crowd was super excited since this show was her first public performance from that album.)  

Not surprisingly, she did an acoustic version of "Paris," which is not on her normal set list.  

The costumes were also fun and inventive, and we marveled at how quickly the changes were made.  And it was also great to see all of her costumes mirrored in the crowd (with a clear preference for the sparklier eras).  

This is not an experience we will soon forget.  Here are some photos.