We awoke early, full of energy and plans, for today was the day we planned to venture farthest afield of all, on our only trip outside of Paris, to see the palace at Versailles. We had a bit of passing trepidation about this, since we had now made plans to re-attempt the "illuminations" bus/boat tour again this evening and weren't sure if we would be back in time, but that trepidation was considerably eased by not really caring that much if we missed the tour. We headed down to the cave for a quick sustaining breakfast, made our morning preparations, and were off, pleased with ourselves for how early we had gotten moving today.

Shari had plotted our course already: a Métro ride to the most convenient station where we could catch the RER (pronounced, I suppose, something like "air euh air"), sometimes referred to by English speakers as "the suburban train," which connects Paris to many points beyond the reach of Le Métro. Shari had analyzed the trade-offs available and wisely chosen a route that involved a bit more distance and an extra connection on the Métro to get us to the RER at a point from which we wouldn't have to make any connections, and would travel less distance, once on the RER. An excellent move! The Métro runs every half minute, the RER every half hour. We knew exactly how to use the Métro and had unlimited passes, while we knew next to nothing about the RER. Any connection that could be made on the Métro instead of the RER was clearly to our advantage.

We made it to our station, no problem, exited from the Métro part of the station to the RER part, and approached the guichet (ticket booth). This wholly new transportation system was a new challenge for us, and I approached it with some anxiety, having once gotten thoroughly lost in the middle of England after going to the right platform and getting on the (wrong) train that appeared there. I hoped the RER would be easier than BritRail had been.

While standing in line, Shari checked the map and I checked my dictionary: a round trip is "aller et retour." To make sure, I cross checked with the British term "return," which generally means "round trip," not just the second half of a round trip as an American might expect. The dictionary was clear enough with the multiple meanings of such a word to make me pretty confident I had the right phrase.

When we got to the front of the line at the "guichet," I uttered my carefully rehearsed if not very grammatical: "deux personnes, pour Versailles, aller-et-retour, s'il vous plait," and succeeded in buying two round-trip tickets to Versailles—really just four tiny card stubs of the type that would pass through the automatic turnstiles. We looked at the tickets and, several "I can't believe it" re-calculations later, figured out how much we had just paid for the ride: only about $5 each, round trip.

After a 10 or 15 minute wait on the platform, the train arrived right on schedule. Shari had seen a note on the monitor saying it was a "short train," but hadn't known how to translate that into any immediate action we should take. I hadn't even seen it. So, we were both taken quite by surprise when the train came into the station and went thundering right past us, the rearmost car stopping some 50 yards past where we were waiting! We made a mad dash to the rear door of the rear car, and managed to push our way on before the train pulled out. It was quite crowded, of course, since so many mad dashers just like us had gotten on that car, so at the next stop we got off and made another mad dash to get back on the train one or two cars further forward. I believe we could have walked from car to car freely—it looked safe and there was no sign saying not to—but Shari didn't want to try it, and in a foreign land where you don't know all the rules it's always best to err on the conservative side.

We wondered in retrospect if we could have been better prepared for this, then decided we couldn't have known. Shari noted that when BART, for example, has a short train, it stops in the middle of the platform, not the front end, so even if we had really taken time to ponder what "short train" might mean, we still likely wouldn't have known how to be in the right place. Well, no matter, we were on the right train and the spurt of exercise probably did us good.

The trains were quite comfortable, if showing their age somewhat, and were arranged in groups of upholstered seats facing one another in little foursomes. The cars were double decked, but the upper level looked rather crowded so we settled into some seats on the lower tier and had a smooth, quiet, comfortable, and reasonably fast ride of about half an hour to Versailles.

The only real annoyance on this train was a huge group of identically-jacketed American teenage girls who got on soon after we sat down, evidently some kind of trip of a high-school group traveling together (Shari concluded that it was something like a drill team or twirling squad). They must have been from somewhere in the midwest because they kept discussing their spring break plans at the Lake of the Ozarks.

We turned our attention out the windows instead, getting our first good view of more suburban France. We passed large complexes of heavy industry and big cement apartment buildings, the giant dilapidated and rusty structures we'd see one minute providing a stark contrast to the tiny and neatly tended townhouses and their gardens always around the next curve. It was clearly suburban ranging to rural, but in the compact, manicured style of rural Europe rather than the rambling haphazard style of rural North America. I would later learn by asking Shari that Versailles is only twelve miles from Paris—the very fact that the gradient was so sharp that one could go from urban to suburban to rural to small-town in that short a distance is in itself testament to the compactness of the European style.

We arrived at the train station in Versailles in very good order, and rummaged in a panic for our train tickets—it turned out that we had to put into the turnstile the same tickets we'd entered with in order to exit. This taken care of, we stopped in the main hall of the train station to consult about how exactly we would find the palace. This was well outside the scope of any of our Paris maps, so we had no idea, on a micro scale, of where we were. We needn't have worried. Huge signs specifically for the purpose gave directions to the Palace, le Chateau, and Der Koenigschlosse, as well as some local attractions in Chinese and Japanese, all of which were roughly two blocks down and two blocks over. Versailles blocks weren't as wimpy as Paris blocks, but they were about normal to a Midwesterner, so this really was as conveniently close as it sounds.

After a brief walk, during which we discovered the huge and ornate city hall and the memorial of the people from Versailles killed in the two world wars, we found the palace, right where it was supposed to be. We passed through a giant wrought-iron fence with gold-plated tips and gates, and into a huge cobblestone courtyard centered on a regal-looking statue of Louis XIV on horseback and surrounded by the small-city-sized complex that made up the palace of Versailles. Such was the size and grandeur that even the massive throngs of tourists moving in and out couldn't make this a crowded place.

It quickly became evident from watching some of the women tourists walk over the cobblestones that the engineers of Versailles were driven by two things: a prophetic vision of a future of high heels, skateboards, and rollerblades, and a desire to securely defend their palace from invasion by these technologies. The rough, irregular cobblestones jutting out of the ground like the tops of so many children's blocks scattered on the floor, with the carefully dimensioned gaps in between, were sure to stop anyone attempting entry by such methods. Truly, a formidable defense.

We wandered around looking at some of the signs and found a dizzying variety of pre-packaged experiences to be had: it seemed that all possible combinations and permutations of guided, unguided, and audio-recorded tours of various sections of the palace and grounds in various categories were all available for varying prices. We settled upon starting with an unguided admission to the state apartments, including the various art galleries and other sundries included in the package, and we joined the correct one of several giant queues to get there. While waiting in the queue, we took pictures of Louis XIV and some of the architectural features, and something very interesting happened—a French couple shoved in front of us, and another French guy came over and started yelling at them, eventually sending them back to the end of the line. It was fabulous, and the only example we would see in France of anyone insisting that anyone respect the concept of waiting in line.

Upon nearing the front of the queue, we saw several American tourists hopping over the velvet ropes, and from what they were doing discovered the remarkable: that our 5-day museum passes were good for admission here. In fact, these tourists also believed that their passes meant they didn't have to wait in line, which is a usual privilege of the museum pass—I don't know about that, since there wasn't any separate entrance and they just shoved their way to the front, but didn't matter to us since we were already there. We were just thrilled to hear that we didn't have to pay, since we surely would have quietly paid full admission without ever thinking about it.

This turn of events made our choice of vacation package option seem like pure genius. In order to get the museum pass, we had agonized over giving up the option which would have included a tour of Versailles. We now realized that what we had given up was pathetically little: the train ride here had cost us each $5 round trip, and the admission was covered by our museum pass, so this was costing us next to nothing. Furthermore, if we had come here on the package tour, they would have herded us onto a coach bus, which would have been slower and less scenic than the train ride. About the only thing we had given up by coming here on our own instead of with the tour was the presence of a tour guide, which neither one of us particularly wanted anyway.

We skipped the ticket booths, showed our passes, and were allowed in, where we began to push our way into the dense mass of humanity entering the palace.

The state apartments were clearly a case of "saving the best for last," as the path there required first passing through a long maze of the stuff no one would have bothered to see if it wasn't on the way to something else. Proper homage of oohs and ahhs had to be paid in turn to each one of countless galleries and stone chambers scattered with statues, busts, and even one or two burial crypts of French royalty. One highlight of this part of the tour for me was the chapel, which couldn't compare to the Notre Dame cathedral in size, but more than made up for it in the density of its painting and giltwork, and with the gleaming pipe organ that covered one entire end.

An ornate, hand-painted ceiling at the palace of Versailles. Sam doing his fine imitation of sizzling bacon on the floor of the palace...Actually, he was taking a picture of the ceiling at left.

In addition, there were several full museum-scale art galleries, lined from floor to high ceiling with paintings of medieval era French battles, the obligatory contemporary king or prince occupying a large portion of the frame in each one, looking manly yet notably unbloodied above the fray, invariably astride a large white horse. Shari, who is formally educated as a historian, probably got a lot more out of this than I did; most of the names and even the faces seemed familiar to her, and she had fun looking for some of her favorites.

We finally reached the actual chambers in which the French kings and queens had lived. These looked very much like the similar chambers in Mad Ludwig's palaces in Bavaria, especially of course the palace at Herrenchiemsee which had been an intentional copy of Versailles. The difference was the huge mobs of people making it difficult and frustrating to see much. Giant swarms of guided tours pushed through at the same time as random unguided tourists, each tour guide lining his or her charges along the velvet ropes for many minutes at a time, as if to create job security by intentionally blocking the goodies from the view of any unwashed cretins who dared enter without guide services. The rooms were distinguished from one another more by which language was being droned by the guides than by any actual features that could be seen. I held my camera overhead at arm's length in several chambers, hoping that after returning home, I could examine some of what it was I was supposed to have seen, particularly in the more popular places, like Marie Antoinette's bedroom. We still saw enough to be thoroughly impressed, it just wasn't the overall experience we might have hoped for.

We learned in this period that we have been very wrong all these years to ridicule large groups of Japanese tourists. The rudest, most obnoxious, and most deserving of scorn by far are the Italians, who are beyond compare but are followed as a distant second by the Russians. After that the ranking becomes less clear, but the French and Germans and Spanish are all in the next tier. The Japanese are, under such trying conditions, the most polite of them all.

After exiting the state apartments, we found the gift shop counters, where Shari bought some postcards and a little book on Versailles, and I bought some pre-packaged slides, knowing now to ask for "les diapositifs," but having to figure out how to ask for the exact set of them that I wanted out of the several that were available.

We made our way back out to the courtyard, where we decided to seek out some plumbing. For that, we waited in a long and unruly line and paid a very awkward amount of money—half a Franc or something, which translates to about seven cents. It was an sum that served only as an insult, since it was clearly not worth the efforts of the two full-time staff whose jobs it was to collect it, and because it left us carrying an albatross in the form of coins of such small denominations that we hadn't seen them before and surely wouldn't have any further use for them. When a Franc is only worth 15 cents, what are you going to do with those 10 and 20 centime pieces?

The facilities themselves were terrible—the men's room was tiny and had its door standing wide open, leaving the entire facility in plain view of the hall, which was packed full of the queue for the ladies'. So I went into the only stall, even though I was just going to stand up. Shari had a worse experience, having to wait in a much longer line and then suffer the indignity of completing her business while people pounded on the door shouting at her to hurry up. Yeech.

Pain though it was, we had two excellent results out of the experience. First and foremost, we had fulfilled our respective biological requirements. And secondly, we got receipts which are going straight into the scrapbook, because they say: "les toilettes Coeur des Princes." Evidently, we had just visited the famous Toilets of the Princes' Heart! Surely in all the world there can be very few toilets so regal as that!

Incidentally, French bathroom stalls across the board merit a very honorable mention. In what seems to be a definitive triumph of Europe over North America in the contest to be civilized, almost all bathroom stalls there feature complete walls that extend from floor to ceiling, or nearly so, with real doors that have knobs and latches. Although in busy public places they aren't always very clean or pleasant, and in one case we found they didn't even have seats, they certainly win on offering real privacy, not just the pretense of it.

During the tour of the royal apartments, both of us had found ourselves distracted from examining the interior appointments on one side of us by the entrancing view of the royal gardens through the tall windows and French doors of old and slightly wavy glass on the other side. Since there didn't seem to be any further cost involved, we decided to take some time to wander these gardens.

It was indeed a beautiful place, in the manicured way of nominally natural places whose every inch is visibly tended by the hand of man. Pine trees shaved into perfect conical shapes punctuated calf-high walls of perfectly rectangular hedges framing neat rows of weedless flowers and lawns that would be the envy of any golf course green. Odd bits of statuary, low stone walls, and the discovery of intricate figurines carved into the ornate brass pots completed the setting.

We departed the palace of Versailles, passing once again through the giant courtyard, observing to our smug pleasure that the queues were much longer now than when we had entered and noting once again the unfriendly nature of the cobblestones for those less sensibly shod than ourselves.

Biological alarms were reminding us by this time that we had been out quite some number of hours, and that breakfast had been a small and insignificant event of long ago and far away. It was mangein' time!

A slight dilemma presented itself in that we knew nothing about Versailles other than what we had seen in the few blocks we had walked, and we were outside the scope of our Paris guidebooks here. Finding a good restaurant might be a chancy affair, as chancy as it can ever be in France, where finding a good meal seems to be about as difficult as finding snow in Minnesota in December.

We agreed immediately that we had epsilon desire to eat at McDonald's, and a strongly negative amount of desire to fight a mob to do so. We settled on another place we had passed on the way to the palace that had looked fairly good: El Rancho, soon to be dubbed by us "The Best Little Tex-Mex place in all Versailles." Since Shari is an authentic honest-to-goodness Texan, we were going to put to the test how much the French really knew about Tex Mex.

The decor and layout of the place was clearly in the style that would look perfectly at home in the American Southwest—Santa Fe, to be precise. But how far off is it, percentage-wise, to miss by just a few hundred miles out of ten thousand? It had a bar area in front, floored with terra cotta tiles, with chairs upholstered in the colorful roughly woven material used to make those big ponchos that tourists buy in Matamoros or Tijuana. Large signs sporting such icons as cowboy boots touted Corona beer and similar products, while the windows were adorned with colorful hand painted Spanish-clad figures such as might be found at Taco Bell. So far, so good.

The menu did indeed feature real Tex-Mex food items, not the least of which was soda by the PITCHER, something that must in France must constitute quite the ethnic ambience gimmick.

We ordered a pitcher on sight, and were brought that and a basket of chips and salsa, just like back in Texas! Well, not exactly like back in Texas. The tortilla chips were heavily spiced and were in a basket that measured about two inches by five. The salsa was pretty good, but was in a cup about the size of the one you might use at a fast food place when dispensing ketchup from a pump. The soda was in a plastic pitcher just like the one you might get at Pizza Hut, except smaller. Much, much smaller. I think it probably held about as much as two cans of soda, although they made up for some of that by not occupying any of the scant space with needless fillers such as ice.

We pored over the menu for a while, noting the careful French descriptions of such exotic items as fajitas and guacamole, and chose some good old standbys.

We placed our order, and in a French amount of time (i.e. it took FOREVER) our food arrived. My enchiladas were excellent, delicately flavored(!) and topped with a cheese that the menu had claimed was cheddar, and probably was by local definitions, but which obviously was far too good to have ever passed for such back in Texas. And in truest south-of-the-border style, they were served with a generous side dish of sugar snap peas lightly sauteed in butter. Well, maybe that's the style south of the Iowa/Minnesota border! Shari had ordered a taco salad with chicken, and it looked reasonably authentic in its big edible tortilla bowl. We had both a good meal and a good belly laugh, and despite the horrendously slow (by our standards) service, had no real complaints.

Rested and pleasantly full, we took the RER train back into the city, connected onto the Métro, and decided to get off at the Place de la Concorde station, one stop short of "our" Métro station, and walk the rest of the way home past the bustling touristy shops of the Rue de Rivoli. At the Place de la Concorde, we got a closer look at the giant ferris wheel that marks the "other" end of the Champs Elysées, which doesn't have the Arc de Trimophe, and saw the genuine Egyptian obelisk brought here by Nile river boat, its gleaming gold-plated tip catching the rays of the afternoon sun.

We intended to stop along the Rue de Rivoli at a little cafe which, the guide book promised, makes it their specialty to serve hot chocolate made from giant freshly melted bars of the best chocolate. We did find the place, but at that hour it was mobbed, so we decided to pass for the time being. At the very least, we got to see another fun part of town and more of "our" neighborhood in the direction we hadn't been from our hotel.

We returned to our room and napped for a brief time. Shari pointed out how nicely it seemed to work out to come back and rest for a while at this time of afternoon, recharging us quite nicely from our daytime runnings around and leaving us raring to go again for the evening. The photographer in me was about to gripe loudly about that—there are only two really good hours of light in a day, the hour around sunrise and the hour around sunset, and she was going on about how well it worked out for us to be in bed for both of them. But I was tired, photography was secondary to having a good time, and Shari was absolutely right: the rest period at this time of day was working out extremely well for us. I also knew that if I wanted to go out and take pictures while Shari took her nap, she would have had no problem with that—and I didn't want to do that, I wanted a nap! I finally comforted myself with the argument that with the constant gray overcast, I wasn't missing much in the way of sunset light in any event, and I drifted off to sleep.

We roused ourselves around 6 p.m. in time to walk one block over to the Cityrama office, where our tour had been re-scheduled from the previous night. This time the place was mobbed with people, and several large buses parked out front, their drivers running around shouting instructions at each other, suggested that there would be some actual tours going on. We went to the counter to trade our voucher for tickets, as instructed, and were sent away with our voucher still in hand, told to just wait for an announcement telling us what bus to get on, then give the voucher to the bus driver. Once again, they made no record that we were there and no attempt to add us to any head count. Eventually, the announcement came in French and English: Illuminations tour, get on bus #4.

The trouble this time seemed to be that there were roughly twice as many people slated for the "Illuminations" tour as would fit on the bus. While the office staff continued to direct everybody to bus #4, the stern and bitchy tour guide on the bus itself barred the door and decided to limit boarding to those people who had certain types of tours. Apparently, they sell all different combinations and permutations of the same three or four basic attractions. This woman had decided, probably for reasons of efficient bus routing, that people going on the Illuminations tour and then Moulin Rouge (a well known can-can show) would have priority over those going on Illuminations alone or, like us, Illuminations plus the riverboat ride.

We stood around the entrance of the bus with a large number of other tourists, mostly British, sending delegates to various points at regular intervals to make our complaints.

Finally, bitchy tour guide decided that she had accounted for everyone who had Illuminations plus Moulin Rouge and she would let some people on who had Illuminations in various other combinations, but all she had left was a few individual separate seats.

This caused us a momentary quandary whether to get on the bus or not. I had almost zero confidence in the vague promises we'd heard muttered about that another bus would come, so I would surely have gone for it had this been a transportation link or if we had cared about this bus tour, but we didn't. By this point, the only reason we were still even bothering to stand there was that we thought we might still want the boat ride. So we, and all of the Brits, announced we would not board, but would wait for the mythical "other bus." I half hoped it wouldn't come, since I'm not big on bus tours anyway and knew we could go on the riverboat on our own, which at this point seemed like a good idea even if it meant paying for it ourselves if we weren't able to wrest our paid tickets from these idiots. The river boats were just a quick Métro ride away, and Shari even knew where they were.

Wonder of wonders, another bus did come, this one somewhat smaller—it looked double-decker like the others, but had available seating only on the UPPER deck, so I suppose the lower part must have been a luggage/cargo hold. All the remaining people piled on, along with many others we hadn't seen before, and we basked in the slightly lesser discomfort level of a half-empty bus. A tour guide came through distributing cheesy plastic-tube headphones, of the type airlines no longer use, for the multi-lingual narration.

Among the new arrivals were a group of rowdy Italians, who neatly confirmed our earlier conclusions about Italians by being just as rude as the ones at Versailles, pushing and shoving, carrying on loudly in Italian, and throwing around the headphones, which they either couldn't figure out or couldn't be bothered with.

Finally, we departed for Illuminations, the tour of discovery of the lighted monuments of Paris by night, long awaited and much heralded.

The Illuminations tour was, to put it mildly, the most inane, content-free claptrap we could ever have imagined. Clearly, someone in Marketing decided to offer a tour and told an assistant: "oh, by the way, come up with some content, I don't care what it is, just let me know when you're done."

The bus circled in an area that must have been smaller than what we had walked that day, spending 90% of its time waiting in traffic. The narration seemed to consist of about four sentences every five minutes and silence the rest of the time. What little it did say was mostly going on about the "noble proportions" of yet another stone building that lacked any notable features other than its rectangular shape, or claiming that the lighting of the city's monuments had been a "feat of engineering prowess" (pronounced in that hoity-toity British accent that makes it sound like he said "engineering pry-ess"). This demanded that the question be asked, and Shari asked it: How many engineers does it take...."

They didn't bother to take us to the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower, the only monuments in the city that truly are splendid when lit up at night—since Paris has a statue or fountain or really old building on every corner, I suppose they didn't feel the need to bother. In the end, we were looking at each other with the most pained looks every time the narration said anything, and deriving what amusement we could from the very stupidity of the whole thing.

After a mercifully short tour, the bus returned to the tour company office to load some more passengers, and I suppose to let off anyone who had only paid for the Illuminations tour, before departing again for the riverboat ride. We had our boat tickets, which had been given to us as we boarded the bus, so we considered getting off the bus at this point and taking the Métro to the boat ride, just to be free of the tour company's incompetence. Eventually, we decided to take the free bus ride, since they seemed to be getting it moving reasonably quickly.

The boat tour departed from a dock almost directly underneath the Eiffel Tower, a wonderful sight all lit up at night. While Shari was in the rest room, I plunked down my tripod and snuck a couple of pictures of the Tower with the lights of a Christmas tree mirroring its shape in the foreground.

After a long wait, we were packed like sardines onto the boat, finding seats near the back in the outdoor uncovered part for the best possible views. The boat also offered pre-recorded narration, in French over the loudspeakers and in other languages over some telephone-style handsets that extended from the arms of the seats. Shari's handset didn't work. Mine worked, but wouldn't switch to English. The one in the vacant seat next to me worked and did English fine, but was too soft to hear. I wrestled with it long enough to figure out that it was another one of these four-sentences-every-five- minutes commentaries and wasn't continuous enough to be worth holding a piece of inert plastic to my head the rest of the time.

Even without usable narration, or perhaps because of that lack, the boat tour was magnificent. the lights of the city glittered off of the silken black waters of the Seine as we floated gently past stone walls, riverboats, and statues adorning centuries-old bridges and gaped at the nighttime splendor of such sights as Notre Dame, the Pont Neuf, and the Musée d'Orsay, this time with the light streaming through its giant glass clock faces from the inside. We enjoyed this ride thoroughly, more than enough to make up for the stupidity of the bus tour, and returned to the dock with our faith restored. Still, we'd had quite enough of this particular bus-tour company and didn't get back on the bus, wandering off instead to see the Eiffel Tower by night, knowing that thanks to the Métro, transportation home was at our disposal at any time.

About the first thing we came to was a small brightly-lit amusement area evidently cashing in on its location almost under the tower. It featured a carousel and a crêpe stand, the latter quite welcome around this time since it had been hours since lunch. After waiting in line a while, we attempted to order some food-type crêpes (as opposed to dessert-type ones) and grasped enough French to understand that they would only sell us either sweet crêpes or hot dogs—I suppose they were ramping down towards closing time. We each ordered a hot dog.

The hot dogs were large, non greasy, and, unlike ones we might get at home, made of some kind of meat. They were served in a baguette of just the right diameter to accommodate them—the baguettes were made hollow by impaling them on a hot-dog sized metal spike, then mustard and the hot dog were fed in. It was a big improvement over our accustomed style of split buns not only in the quality of the bread, but also because its self-contained shape could be held in one hand and could neither fall apart nor spill condiments. We sat on a bench by the carousel and ate our hot dogs, discovering that the mustard was extremely spicy and very concentrated in the bottom of the bread tube.

After the hot dogs, we wanted some dessert, so back we went to the crêpe stand to get some sweet crêpes. Once again we grasped just enough French to understand—they wouldn't sell us crêpes anymore. The next phase of their closing-time plan had apparently kicked in. ARGH!

We crossed the street to the Eiffel Tower. The tower is of such a peculiar shape that it is difficult to visually grasp its true dimensions. My first thoughts were that it really is much smaller than I expected. The arches at the base seemed only two or three stories high, and the square courtyard between the four towers could be crossed at a leisurely stroll in perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, seemingly not much bigger than the dome at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

After returning home, I would look up the height of the tower and of some other famous monuments with which to compare it, and find that its height, numerically speaking, really is very impressive. It stands 984 feet tall, or 1052 if you count the antenna. When it was built, in 1887-1889, it was the tallest building in the world, a title it held for some forty years until the Empire State Building was built. And this was meant to be a temporary exhibit for a World's Fair!

For comparison, the tallest building in North America in 1889 was only 284 feet, and the tallest that would be built in the next decade were the New York World building, at 309 feet (1890), and the Singer tower, at 612 feet (1905).

I did a quick web search for some of the tallest things I could think of, and found that the Eiffel Tower was only a little shorter than the top names in famous tall buildings, and greatly taller than such landmarks as the TransAmerica building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Washington Monument, or Seattle's Space Needle.

So why doesn't it look all that big from close up? My theories are several. First, it really is a needle, much skinnier for its height than the paintings or even photographs suggest. The base seems a normal size for a much smaller building, and the rest of the structure doesn't lend itself to any sense of scale, because it becomes slimmer as it recedes just a little faster than would be normal visual perspective of a tallish object. Finally, the Eiffel Tower stands all by itself—there is no skyline and no other tall buildings nearby to give any sense of scale.

Incidentally, it is no doubt this very tall, very tapered needle shape, consisting of all support structure and nothing being supported by it, that allows the tower to make the remarkable claim that in high winds, the top sways only 12 cm—less even than the 15cm that the tower gets taller or shorter as the temperature varies.

In any case, regardless of the size or engineering, it is a spectacular sight by day and all the more so by night. We limbered our necks from gawking upwards, and approached the ticket window that occupied one side of the North Tower, purchasing tickets for the second of the three levels.

The elevators in the tower are quite a marvel in themselves. They are two stories high, built as two large cars stacked one on top of the other, but not stacked squarely—the top one is skewed somewhat off of the bottom one, creating a profile like two stair steps, the better to make its ascent up an angled, not vertical, shaft. They are ancient things, (though I think somewhat more recent than the tower itself) their cables out in the open, turning over giant cast-iron pulleys.

I figured out later that the way they work is this: At the bottom, the elevator's two stacked cars are loaded with tourists bound for the first two levels of the tower. Tourists boarding the upper car are bound for the second level, and have already climbed one flight of stairs to get to the boarding platform, while tourists boarding the lower car have paid only for the lowest level, and they board at ground level. Two operators, one in each car, each have fairly sophisticated looking panels, so I'm guessing there are enough interlocks that the elevator doesn't move until both operators are ready. The elevator climbs a diagonal shaft up one leg of the tower to the first observation level, where it stops. At this point, only the lower car opens, discharging the tourists. The elevator then moves to the second level, where the upper car lets out its load. Since we were in the upper car and couldn't see all of these events, I figured this out only because there was an unexplained stop, at which the doors didn't open, in between the ground and our destination on both the upwards and downwards trips.

The second level of the Eiffel Tower is a strange place, smaller than I had expected, with clanging textured steel floors, unexpectedly low railings made of more steel, and a densely packed assortment of oddly jutting beams and structural features that the unwary could easily fall down, trip over, or bump heads or other body parts into. Glass windows, the only surfaces visible that aren't made of steel, surround a little gift shop in the middle, and there is a tiny restaurant named after Jules Verne which is said to be exceptionally expensive and very hard to get into, despite being not that great. But the clear attraction here is the view, which is vast and totally uninterrupted. It's a bit odd to see the lights of Paris spread so boundlessly without the distinguishing feature of the Eiffel Tower in the view, but the rest of the city makes up for it. I found that the view of the Trocadero complex and its fountains from the Eiffel Tower was almost as nice as the view of the Eiffel Tower had been from the Trocadero the night before.

Assuming that my tripod would probably be disallowed here if anyone saw me using it, I did not set it up, but just braced it on the top of the railing for a few partially- stabilized photos of the city lights by night.

By the time we decided to turn our attention to descending again, closing time must have been approaching, because huge mobs of people were milling in a great mob around the elevator doors like turkeys in the pen at feeding time. We joined the mob, which was a tiring activity of constant re-positioning and clever incidental placement of body parts to try to prevent people from pushing in front of us. Because the elevator was very slow—only arriving every five or ten minutes—there was a tremendously long time of everyone jockeying and elbowing for position before the magic moment occurred. When the doors actually did open, the press of the crowd was such that I thought I could almost make out the sound of hundreds of ribs cracking in unison and the faint death cries of the hapless trampled. Then the elevator operator had to somehow stop the tide to get the doors shut, and the jockeying for position began again. About three elevator-trips later, we finally made it on, squeezed to the back of the car, and fought for air the several minutes it took to get back to the ground.

The heat of the crowd had just about re-warmed us from standing in the cold wind on the tower, so Shari didn't mind too much waiting for a few minutes while I opened up my tripod and took some long-exposure pictures of the tower from just beneath it. Lit up at night, it's a magical sight from _ANY_ angle.

After that, it was time to head home, and think again about getting something else to eat, since we had been denied our crêpes. Once again, we were faced with the Eiffel Tower's awkward location almost equidistant between three different Métro stops with no obvious choice. We decided to cross the Seine, return to the Trocadero, and take the Métro from there.

At the Trocadero, we passed two more crêpe stands, but since they didn't look that good and had long lines, I thought it would be better to wait until we got back to our hotel and visit the crêpe man near there, who was known to be excellent. This would turn out to be a serious mistake.

We reached our "home" Métro station and were walking the short distance back when, on the corner near our hotel, we were approached by a confused looking couple who tried to ask us directions in the worst French we'd ever heard other than our own. Obviously, more American tourists! We switched instantly to English and tried to help them, but didn't have a clue, since they obviously weren't where they thought they were—their hotel wasn't known to us, meaning it wasn't within a several block radius as they thought it was, and the street they were looking for wasn't on Shari's map. It turned out we hadn't been quite correct thinking they were American tourists, since they turned out to be Canadians from Nova Scotia.

What was highly amusing though, was that when they first asked directions, I had congratulated them for making such a good effort in French, and they gave us a snooty look and said: "oh, we're both bilingual. We speak Arcadian French, but they seem to be really good about accepting that here." Uh huh. Yeah. Right. What, did they think we just fell off the croissant boat? Their French was even worse than ours! I haven't heard such French as theirs since second year high school French class, and I know it wouldn't pass muster in Louisiana. I suppose I'll start calling myself bilingual too, because the last time I ate beans, I sounded for the next few hours exactly like a Frenchman (who had also eaten beans).

As if we weren't already primed to spend the next hour rolling on the floor laughing at these people the instant they were out of sight, just as they were leaving the gentleman held out to Shari a piece of paper that had changed hands in the shuffle of looking at maps, and said: "this is yours, ay?" It wasn't, actually, it belonged to his wife, but we both had to bite our lip to avoid replying: "take off, ay?"

An Elaine original: How do you spell Canada? You spell it "C," ay? "N," ay? "D," ay?

We passed our hotel and went to the crêpe stand on the corner to find that—OH, NO!—it was closed! Since it was pretty late by this time and just about everything in the area was closed, we went back to our room somewhat defeated. I went back down the steps to ask at the front desk if there was any place else to get crêpes, and who should be standing there but Mr. "I'm bilingual, ay?." Asking directions of the clerk in English. From the long confusion, I gather that the hotel clerk was unable to help much either, and the guy eventually went off to hail a taxi in the blind hope that a cab driver would know where his hotel was—he still swore it was within a four block radius somewhere. He had to ask five or six times whether the taxi stand was to the right or left, so apparently his fluent French had failed him. His wife wasn't with him anymore. She apparently was totally fed up and had decided to wait on the street corner. Some people you just have to pity for no other reason than because they're doomed to go through life being themselves.

As soon as the Arcadian (snicker snicker) left, I went to the desk and inquired: "est-ce que c'est possible acheter des crêpes a cette heure?" What followed may have been the most sophisticated two-way understanding I ever achieved in a conversation in French, as the clerk told me that near the Champs Elysées or l'Opéra it might be possible, but not in this district. I was quite sure the clerk spoke excellent English, but was delighted that he didn't feel the need to, and that I grasped his meaning.

We watched a little TV and went to bed without our crêpes, and poor Shari was so hungry that she resorted to drinking a coke out of the mini bar, seemingly horrified to watch herself do it.

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All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.