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Published: June 30th 2009
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As the plan today was to see the Eiffel tower, we got an early start in hopes of avoiding the lines. The metro here goes above ground almost as much as it goes below ground, so it is a good way of getting a slice of the city. To me, the small apartment balconies that you see in Paris are the most typical feature. Our own apartment has this design with a window opening to a small sort of fake balcony with large hinged windows that open into the apartment.
I find icons like the Eiffel tower very surreal to see in real life. It is almost as if you have to keep reminding yourself that what you are seeing is the actual thing. They are so familiar from photos, it is strange to see them with your own eyes.
When we arrived at the tower there was an enormous line snaking out from a ticket booth. Security seemed quite tight with machine gun toting soldiers walking patrol. There were numerous souvenir sellers with Eiffel tower replicas, hundreds of them on a chain. They must be selling them illegally as we saw a scuffle break out as a regular
police man arrested one in front of us. It seemed almost like a runner trying to steal a base in baseball and being picked off by the pitcher. Both sides seemed to know what the other was up to and it was a constant game of cat and mouse with the vendors fading into the background for a minute or two and then reappearing.
As we watched the cat and mouse game between the vendors and the police, Evy went to check to see if we were in fact in the right line to take the stairs up the tower. It turned out we were in the line for the elevator to the top. As we planned to climb the stairs, we entered a much shorter line and were quickly on our way up.
Climbing the stairs was not actually that hard, partly because we had to stop from time to time where there was a backlog of people. We quickly found ourselves at the first level platform. There was a good view from here in all directions and with the river Seine so close by, it was easy to get oriented to landmarks such as the Arc
de Triumph, the Louvre, and the a copy of the Statue of Liberty that sits further down along the Seine. Directly below us, the long line of people for the elevator now looked like a giant question mark.
The Eiffel tower has appeared in numerous movies and there was a small viewing cinema set up showing clips from various movies including Funny Face staring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn as well as more recent films like Superman II.
After visiting the first level for a bit, we made our way to the second level. The elevator from here to the top level was not open today as they are painting up there, so we had to settle for walking around at this level before taking the elevator back down to the ground level.
We walked a short distance away from the tower where we found a park where we ate our picnic lunch, opting to do this before our tour of the Paris sewers !
Not far from the tower along the banks of the Seine is a spot where you can enter and take a tour of the sewers of Paris. We lucked out in
that the kids were free and there was a discount for teachers (those cards we got in Egypt are proving useful again).
The tour of the sewers, as you might expect, was somewhat smelly, though not quite as bad as I had imagined. It was partly historical, showing the development of a Paris sewer system starting with open sewers and evolving to the set up that they have today. It also had displays of various machinery and techniques that have been used to dredge the system including a rather ingenious set up where a vast reservoir of water “flushes” the system periodically.
After the sewers, we walked along the Seine and crossed one of the bridges. In a strange feeling of deja vu, I found we were now looking down at the tunnel, where Lady Diana had crashed. At first I thought it must just look like the same place, but when you looked at the area around the tunnel, there were messages and words of remembrance written on the concrete. It was very strange indeed to suddenly come across this and see how close it was to the Eiffel tower.
Back a our apartment, we spent
the rest of the afternoon getting school work done. As well, we made arrangements to book our homeward flight, though there is some paperwork that needs to be sent in to finalize things. We also made some attempts to find a place to stay in the Towns of Arras or Lille as we want to head up that way to see the Vimy Ridge memorial before crossing the channel to England.
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