Eiffel Reflections

Paris Day 4
Very slow day. Wandered through the Tuileries Garden, photographing this and that. The fountains and leafy shaded aisles of chestnuts were pleasant in the midst of such flattening heat. A population of tourists, children and lovers.

I talked myself and Sam into going to the Eiffel Tower. Once we stood under its vast spiderwork of girders it was daunting. I wondered if we should go up in the lift after all. The groups of soldiers casually strolling everywhere with their far from casual automatic weapons increased my edginess (did they know something we should but didn't?).

The queues were daunting also. But we were there and, really, what else was there to do except walk away from an opportunity to ascend the tourist landmark to end all tourist landmarks, a life-sized souvenir too gigantic to be merely kitsch?

I wondered if it might be less scary to go up the stairs to the first level, as some people were doing. I wondered if we should give it a miss and go look for something to eat. Poor Sam. My nervousness made her nervous. After over half an hour of queueing we boarded the lift (crammed in with my nervousness, her claustrophobia and a crush of giddy girl-tourists). The lift wasn't really a lift, more like cable-car, as we discovered when it began to tilt alarmingly, climbing the inside leg of the edifice like a resolute ant. We got out on the second floor, already so high that we figured we might as well go the rest of the way. The restaurant was on this level, with prices to rival the elevation. The confusing reflections made it difficult to make out the menu (or anything else), but made for an interesting blip (above).

More queueing. But once we got out at the top I began to feel calmer. We were so high now that the hazy cityscape seemed unreal, a 2D map, nothing to do with us. And the tower didn't budge. It's rivetted girders helped give the impression of some indestructable old-world liner. There was a museum: behind smeared portholes some neglected manikins with sun-faded clothes, among them presumably the original designer/architect. I didn't bother to look for info, more interested in the living people peering in.

Afterwards we rewarded ourselves with a magnificant dinner in a restaurant nearby, a superb finishing touch to a proper (much-delayed) honeymoon.