Idlers of Empire: Recap of Paris, Part Quatre

Isn't learning the French cardinal numbers fun? I kid, I kid.

On Friday evening, I decided we should visit the Eiffel Tour, or as I insisted on calling it to bug K: La Tour Eiffel!!! I think we might have seen it from a long distance away as we were walking through Paris earlier in the

day, but it looked so dinky and small that I was very disappointed, so much so that I really was expecting something really lame. We walked out of the Metro (the Paris version of the Tube) and didn't see the damned thing anywhere. We started walking in what we thought might be the correct direction, but other than the ubiquitous street cafes and statued squares, we didn't see anything of note. The all of a sudden we saw a few people with cameras leaning against the side of one of the white-stoned buildings. And then we saw it -- in a fit of lights that looked more Las Vegas than Paris, La Tour Eiffel! (See, doesn't it sound better that way?) The strobe and search lights served to be our Star of Wonder for the evening, and eventually we made it to the park that stretches for at least a quarter mile past the Eiffel Tower. There were many people there with picnics, vendors selling cheap wine from their backpacks, and people hawking cheap Eiffel Tower key-chains and the like.

I couldn't get over how beautiful the Eiffel Tower was at night. And how big! I must have seen it from very far away, because standing near it made all of Paris look tiny. The shot on the right was taken pretty far away and it *still* filled up most of the frame. It truly is a wonder of engineering and quite beautiful when the strobe lights die down and its normal night-time lights illuminate the dark sky. K. and I were both filled with a very childlike glee as we walked home that night--not just that we'd seen something as iconic as the Eiffel Tower, but in this age of bombastic sites, it still held up and was worth getting pestered by wine vendors every three seconds. Plus, I am now the proud owner of an Eiffel Tower key-chain that someone accidentally dropped. I'm Ricky the Raccoon: I can spot shiny things from 30 paces.