OK, the shot the everyone takes. Can’t leave Paris without it.
At least we had a beautiful day for it. Actually, we’ve been pretty lucky. Although we’ve had mostly cool, crisp days, we haven’t really had a bummer since we’ve been here. Lots of overcast, a couple of rain showers, but on the whole we can’t complain about the weather. (Watch: as soon as I say that, we’ll probably get 2 days of rain.) This day was the day we didn’t go up the Tour because it was getting late in the afternoon and the lines were awful. Most of these people are in one of the four lines.
I’m not really sure what these people were queued up for. Vampires, kilts, pirates, parasols, top hats. ??? It’s not Halloween yet.
Anyway, we vowed to come back early on the next clear day to beat the lines. Yeah, right. We ended up just as late as this day and again stood in long lines. I will say that, contrary to back in the 60’s, the French (and the tourists) are quite line polite. No elbowing ahead or anything. That didn’t make things move any quicker, however. Loni remains easily located with her red sequined hat. Check out the picture, though; virtually nobody except some tourists wears a hat, neither men nor women. We’re waiting in the wimp line: the “elevator only” tower. One of the others is a “walk up only” tower. We did that in ‘66; not in ‘11.
The little yellow box in the picture below is our elevator car. It comes down at an angle almost all the way from the second platform. If you want to go to the very top, you change there to another elevator for a more vertical climb to the peak.
The tower, of course, is named after its designer, Gustave Eiffel, and was built as a temporary structure for the 1889 World Fair. It was roundly criticized as an eyesore at the time, and almost was torn down in 1909, but was saved because it was an ideal platform for the newfangled radio transmitters. It is 324 meters high, so over 1,000 feet.
After inching our way through the snaking line, we got our tickets and had our bags searched, and waited for our car to come back down, which we could see through the glass panes above us. It’s a double-decker affair, and the bottom part has a mannequin that sits outside the car like the old-time operators used to. You can just see his body in the picture below, to right, bisected by the white bar across the viewing window. It got a lot more crowded in there right after I snapped our picture. In fact, the alarms went off and the operator (inside, these days) had to ask a few folks to get off so we would be within the weight limit. Gurk. I don’t like to cut things that fine!
We made it without any fuss, to the second level viewing platform, which is as far as we went. Things are just too small from the very top, like looking down from the Empire State Building. From this level, however, Paris is sweet. This is looking north towards Sacre Coeur (the spires just to right of center), which is the Montmartre section of town where our apartment is.
It looks like this through the telephoto. We live just over the hill behind the cathedral.
Remember our excursion to La Defense, the high-rise business section? Here it is in the background, off to the west. In the foreground leading back from the Seine are the Jardins du Trocadero, backed by the curved arms of the Palais de Chaillot (which now houses an architecture museum, a maritime museum, the Museum of Man (currently closed), and an aquarium. This was built for the 1937 World’s Fair.
On the opposite side, facing essentially southeast, lies the Parc du Champ de Mars, which ends in the distance with the Ecole Militaire buildings. Also, looming in the background, is the single skyscraper that got put up in the 70’s that resulted in the legislation banning any more such eyesores. Get thee to La Defense! Of course, the residential units in that building that look in this direction are very much in demand for the stunning views of all Paris.
Looking off a bit to the northeast, you can see the type of old buildings panorama that the ban sought to preserve. Much better than skyscrapers.
Finally, the views of the Seine were superb. This looks northwest.
There are two restaurants located on the Tour Eiffel. One is the Jules Verne, Alain Ducasse’s fabulously expensive eatery and fortunately requiring about 3 months lead time for a reservation. The other is 58 Tour Eiffel, a tourist-oriented operation, the menu of which allegedly has Ducasse’s imprimatur, and that supposedly is run by the JV folks. Well, that’s like saying that Thomas Keller designs menus for American Airlines. We were hungry, and figured it would be neat to eat on the Tour and enjoy the view. We got a not-bad table, considering virtually the entire place was being held for large tour groups. But you had to go place your order over at a central spot, which had multi-lingual displays of the menu, and even plasticized examples of each dish. I thought they were miniatures of the real deal. Ah, well . . . , think again. We ordered some wine, which was ordinary but not bad, but the downer was the food being served in those little airline plastic plates with a lid on top to keep it warm (after, apparently, it had been nuked in the “kitchen”). This was not a French dining experience. So, unless you’re really dying for that view, skip the 58 and go grab a baguette sandwich somewhere and look AT the Tour instead.
Finished with lunch (that was salmon, by the way), we were finished with the Tour. I grabbed a quick artsy-fartsy shot,
and queued up for the trip back down. We could have walked, but hey, I PAID for a round-trip. Oh, look! The line’s gotten shorter.
Once out of the lift, we strolled across the Seine on the Pont d’Iena and up the stairs to the terrace in front of the Palais de Chaillot, where I realized I had finally become photo-happy, dragooning others to snap ours, and taking pictures of others taking pictures of the Tour. Well, she was a real bride, I think.
Ah, love in Paris.
No comments:
Post a Comment