The Eiffel Tower

The longer we are in Paris, the more we have come to appreciate its charm and beauty.  It is not difficult to see why so many people emigrate to the City of Light, and end up staying a lifetime.  As one woman in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris says, “That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me.”

Surely the Eiffel Tower is the most famous landmark of that city, visited by seven million people every year.  We had originally signed up for a “skip-the-lines” tour for July 14, but somebody must have forgotten that was Bastille Day so it was cancelled.  We rescheduled for this morning, and there were already people lining up early on a Sunday morning as there had been at the Louvre.  Our tour guide, also named Natalie, had come from Ukraine and had been here only four months; she had been an English teacher there and probably spoke it better than French.  But while we felt sorry for her plight – who knows what tragic circumstances had forced her to leave her country when the war started? – it soon became clear that she did not know as much about the Eiffel Tour as she should have (and as I had learned from Rick Steves's Pocket Paris, which I had been reading since Martha gave me a copy).  And despite the “skip-the-lines” tickets, we still had to wait in very long lines for admission.

We did learn from her, however, that the tower had been designed by Gustave Eiffel (who also designed the Statue of Liberty), with construction completed in 1889 as the centerpiece of the World’s Fair, celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution, and was originally bright yellow.  There were many in Paris at the time who considered it a monstrosity.  A group of painters, poets, writers, and artists who called themselves the Committee of Three Hundred opposed its construction from the very beginning.  One of them was the French writer Guy de Maupassant.  Defeated by the tower and annoyed by its immense popularity, de Maupassant couldn’t stand the sight of his “iron arch nemesis,” which seemed to follow him whenever he wanted to stroll around the center of Paris.  At last de Maupassant thought of a safe place where he could avoid the tower that he obviously despised so much: underneath the Eiffel tower itself.  Every day, he had lunch at the tower’s base restaurant, just because “inside the restaurant was one of the few places where I could sit and not actually see the Tower!”

We had no such aversion!  It is an engineering marvel, impressive from a distance but even more so as one approaches and stands in its shadow gazing upward.

We patiently waited for admission, then began the climb – 674 steps:  327 to the first floor, 347 steps to the second.  You used to be able to climb a narrow spiral staircase all the way to the top, but today you must ride an elevator from the second floor to the summit.  From time to time, they stop running the elevator when crowds become too dense, so we felt lucky to be able to squeeze in for the ride to the final third level. The lines and the passengers riding in the final elevator were very crowded!  Almost nobody was wearing a face mask.  This was not the first time (standing in long, closely-packed lines at Heathrow had been another) when we had worried about contracting Covid on this trip.  We knew it was a risk, but we are both vaccinated and had received the second booster as late as May, so we thought it was an unacceptable one.    

The views from the top – 906 feet at this level – were every bit as spectacular as we had been told.  Below us we could see the City of Light spread out in dazzling clear morning light, the Seine river curving dark blue, the parks and the boulevards of the city.  It seemed even taller from up here!  We stood in a short line to order two glasses of champagne, a tradition for those who make it to the top.

We had lunch around the corner at Le Café Castel, and then made our way back to the hotel.  This was the official first day of the Trafalgar Tour, and we were to meet our Tour Director and fellow travelers (46 of us) in the courtyard in the afternoon.  Over the next 12 days we would come to know some of them very well.

We met our Tour Director, Bruno Courtois, who had already sent us several welcoming e-mails.  He was a slim man in his 50s, very professional in his manner, and he spoke English very well, although with a French accent that was sometimes a little difficult for some of the group to understand.  Over the next few days we would find that he had an easy-going French sense of humor, often very subtle.  He warned us, for example, that the French who visited the Côte d’Azur (the French Riviera) often participated in a “very dangerous” activity, bathing in the sea.  We also met Adrian, a young man who was the Wellness Director, a new Trafalgar feature since the pandemic.  Adrian stood at the door to the coach each day dispensing hand sanitizer and good-quality face masks to all who wanted them.  Wearing masks was optional at this point, but most of us did so in the close confines of the coach.  Bruno told us that on his last tour, ten in the group (including himself – presumably at the end of the tour) had tested positive for Covid, thus ending the tour for them per Trafalgar policy and making mask-wearing mandatory for the rest of the tour.  We were surprised at that high number – 25 percent!

We also met some of the others and learned where they were from:  Rod and Doty from Nebraska, Rich and Karen from Durham, Steve and Rosy from Canada, and several of the others.  We had not really known what to expect.  On our last tour to Britain and Ireland three years ago, most of the travelers had been Australian, and by the end of the tour we had come very close to saying “Good dye ta ya, Myte” in the morning on the coach.

By this time we had seen many of the sights of Paris on our own, so we felt like seasoned Parisians!  “Oh yes, the Louvre was wonderful!”  And, “We had champagne on the summit of the Eiffel Tower just this morning!”  We even knew how to take a taxi!  And many of the others spoke little or no French. After the meeting at the hotel, we all took a coach to an introductory dinner at the Bistro des Champs on the Champs Elysees and got to know one another better over dinner and wine, Bruno circulating among all the tables for a toast.  Afterward, we went on an orientation tour, disembarking to look at the Eiffel Tower from another angle and getting some close-up views of the Arc de Triomphe.

Bruno kept up an interesting narrative as we drove through Paris.  “We are on the Right Bank here,” he told us.  “We have a saying:  on the Left Bank, we think; on the Right Bank, we spend!”  The Left Bank is the intellectual part of the City, containing the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne. The 17^th Arrondissement is an expensive part of Paris, he said, with flats (pied-à-terres) selling for €10,000 . . . per square meter.  Rooms are much smaller than we are accustomed to in this country (I was glad we had a balcony).  When we returned to Charlotte at the end of our tour, we were surprised at the lavish size of our hotel room, which included a desk, a chair, two queen beds, and a full-size sofa.   

We would be covering a lot of ground on the first two days of our trip, Bruno told us, so we would be getting up earlier in the morning than usual.  “Luggage in the corridor at 6:45 a.m., coach departs at 7:45 a.m.”  We were accustomed to this type of schedule from our tour three years ago, though, and we had recovered from jet lag by now, so I would be out on the deck in the morning practicing my Tai Chi while the sun was just beginning to paint the upper stories of the nearby buildings pink and lavender.