So we spent a week in Paris.
We feel extremely fortunate to have done so; Leen had a conference to attend, and so aw shucks golly gee whiz, I guess the rest of us will have to come, too. (Especially since a whole lot of our close friends were attending the same conference. A week-long party for me.)
I did not have particular expectations. I mean, it’s Paris, one of the world’s great cities, containing some of the world’s great art, history, fashion, museums, food, architecture, and I think we all get the point.
No one doesn’t like Paris. But I did not expect to love it as much as I did. It was…well. J’aime Paris.
But nothing prepares you exactly for what you see and feel there. Some of it’s way better. Some of it curiously…is not. Here is the first of several entries (subscribe if you haven’t already to get all the subsequent stories) about what nobody tells you:
Have you heard of the Mandela Effect? It’s this phenomenon where a huge number of people believe that a specific thing very definitely happened, when in fact it did not. This often pertains to pop culture references.
But it’s named for this factoid: When did Nelson Mandela die? In prison in the 1980s, right? Nope. 2013.
Other common examples include the Monopoly Man’s monocle (he never had one), the spelling of “Looney Toons” (not “Looney Tunes”), the black tip on Pikachu’s tail (there never was one), the cornucopia on the Fruit of the Loom logo (doesn’t exist), C-3PO’s silver leg (one has always been silver), and so on and so forth.
Well, here’s one of my own personal Mandela Effects: I would swear on a stack of 25 Bibles that the Eiffel Tower is black.
It’s not. It’s beige.
And…that made me like it just a little bit less.
Black is so bold and strong. Beige is…well…beige. Up close, the Eiffel Tower is also pretty rusty. And there’s a lot of maintenance going on. Scaffolding. Construction pods and miscellany. Which…I mean, generally speaking, I’m in favor of maintaining the things that I’m climbing upon. But it’s not pretty to look at. (A lot of the maintenance and upgrade projects around Paris right now are in anticipation of the 2024 Summer Olympics. Gotta tidy up before the world shows up to look inside your cabinets, I guess.)
Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to be at the foot of the thing in person. It’s simultaneously delicate lace and towering steel, rickety and sturdy, modern and timeless. One marvels at the vision and chutzpah of ‘ol Gustave Eiffel.
You also have to have a ticket to get near it. And inside it. It’s a whole thing.
The ticketing is kind of confusing–there are stair tickets, and lift tickets, and tickets to some but not all of the three floors. Some of the tickets are available to purchase online ahead of time, but only some of the time.
If you fail to purchase tickets ahead of time, you will queue your brains out: a queue for the security line, a queue to buy tickets, a queue to get through the security checkpoint, and a queue for the elevator.
We failed to buy tickets online ahead of time because we weren’t sure when we were going to head over there. This was a mistake. But I was willing to stand in line for an hour and whatever it was to get tickets for all of us to get to the top…
…which I also failed to do, because as I neared the end of the ticket line, they flipped over the sign that said: “No more tickets to the top.” Sigh.
See, there are three floors–four if you include the ground floor, which is not a floor at all, but simply the space underneath the Eiffel Tower itself. They call it the Esplanade. It’s where you stand in lines for things.
The first floor (a place you arrive at many, many, many feet up in the air) is pretty neat. There are a couple of places to eat. The “cafeteria,” which is basically just takeaway and a place to sit, has delicious sandwiches. There’s also a sort of playground-ish outdoor bar area that was too crowded for us to frolic upon.
The second floor has the good views (nobody tries to see anything from the first floor). You can walk around the edge all the way ‘round, and there are metal telescopes (that demand your euros) dotted here and there so you can zoom in to see the various bits of Paris below.
The second floor is also the place where the lift drops you off first. It was obscenely crowded when we were there. We all lost track of one another. But there were enough gaps in between people all getting the same exact photo taken to get our own exact same photos taken of ourselves and each other.
There’s a TINY gift shop in the middle of the second floor. Being in there feels like a hostage situation, both because there’s only one way to move through it (single-file, towards the cash register) and because along the way, your child will keep finding junk they want to buy. Specifically, junk that appeals to tourists (American and otherwise) with no taste. Also a few fun little things like activity books for kids and such.
The third floor is the “top,” and it sounds really, really cool…if only we hadn’t failed to get tickets ahead of time or it wasn’t so crowded that they ran out of space up there in the middle of the day. C’est la vie.
The view from the measly second floor is, of course, phenomenal. Though it’s difficult to feel calm up there, with throngs of other tourists jostling you.
But in between the bits of chaos, you can pause and soak it in: You are so lucky to be here. You’re at one of the most famous landmarks in the world, in one of the most wonderful cities in the world, and you can see the whole of it from up here.
You close your eyes and pretend that it isn’t beige.
This piece is part of a series of pieces around our recent trip to Paris. There’s more to come, but you can catch up to where we are so far by reading these. In chronological order: