The first thing you should know is that the Paris Perl Mongers hold a monthly meeting, normally scheduled for the second Wednesday of the month (regardless of whether the day is a public holiday). In any event, the date of the next meeting is always posted on the home page.
If you have any say in the matter, and can arrange your own travel dates, the best thing to do, then, is to come during the second week of the month. On the other hand, this isn't always possible if it's your company that is organising the trip, or if you are attending a conference.
But that's ok too, if you can give us sufficient notice (a month), we will change the date to fit in with your schedule. We do, however, draw the line at weekends: we tried that once and it wasn't a success.
First, an important warning: you should double-check the address below with the address on the French-speaking main page. This English-speaking page is seldom visited, so we forget to update it when needed and it happened once that a visitor tried to go to a no longer existing meeting place.
We meet at Maldoror, located rue du Grand Prieuré, within walking distance from the Place de la République. The nearest subway station is Oberkampf. Other convenients subway stations are Filles du Calvaire and Parmentier. The Maldoror is signaled by a blue-and-red neon sign.
It happened once that the Maldoror was closed on a day when a meeting was scheduled. In this case, the first two Perl mongers chosed a restaurant in the neighbourhood and wrote it on a paper they half-slipped behind the Maldoror's iron curtain. Remember that not everybody has a wifi-enabled PDA with instant messaging and e-mail.
There is only one room in the restaurant, and we usually are the only group with more than three persons, so it is rather easy to find us. If you arrive early, around 8 PM, the group may number only one or two persons, so you may have to ask.
There may be a couple of obvious indices, like Perl books or OpenBSD t-shirts and the like. Otherwise your best bet is to check out what we look like. Meetings kick off at 20:00 (8pm), but people trickle in at least up to one hour later. Things wind up around midnight, so that people can catch the last metro.
The food is good, although a vegetarian will have a hard time with the menu, but then again that is true for France in general, whose unwritten gastronomical motto may well be "eat meat, you feelthy foreigners." You can drink beer, of course, and other assorted alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. You don't have to eat -- some people come along only for dessert or not even that, but a meal and a few beers can be had for less than 30 euros. The food is not served before 9PM.
Topics vary far and wide, and don't always have much to do with Perl per se. Regular favourites include Perl, CPAN modules, Linux, the *BSD family, apache, postfix, firewalls and network security and system administration in general.
Other programming languages that make regular appearances include PostScript, Forth, Lisp and Befunge. More distant subjects include linguistics, mathematics, books read, fiction and non-fiction, recently or not. Web pages seen and useful mailing lists (having a copy of your bookmarks can come in handy).