Walking to the Tower.

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Greetings Gentle Readers! We’re being couch-pommes-de-terre tonight, after a day of lots of walking. We opened with the 3.5km hike to the Eiffel Tower. The tower’s under renovation, so it’s not all pretty as perhaps it was for 2000, but still mighty cool. you can see it a long way off (The Tuilleries, where we started our walk) but from the NE, you lose sight of it for the last ½ km or so, which is cool, because when you re-acquire it, you’re catching it through trees, and it’s really cool. Really easy to imagine folks having a cat when it was first put up.

Two things about the crowds: lots of Rugby fans (mostly the ones sporting yellow and red) and lots of soldiers with assault rifles. Not shouldered arms, either, patrol hold or whatever, hands on grips and fingers on guards. Crap, I hope they were unloaded like the national guard doing the show-thing in the airports after 9/11. I was utterly mystified what they could do with them if needed: shoot up to get attention? There’s a huge fucking tower full of people, not to mention a big assed city around. (See mythbusters for the shooting straight up story) Shoot into the ground? Um, uh, mostly paved and a LOT of rocks. Shoot into the crowd? Well, there ya go, the bullets would be stopped by those soft pink things.

We took a boat bus home, which is punningly called a “BatoBus” (the French word for boat is “bateaux” and you can guess how that’s pronounced) and it was GREAT. What a smooth and calming way to get around, for 13Eu each. Came back to the hotel, chilled, then took off for an explore for dinner (really, late lunch, but I can’t make that clear to The Teen). Wandered across most of the 1re and a lot of the 2me arondissments to end up at a really nice little place we discovered by chance. Couldn’t tell ya the name, nor the place, but the waiter was the pride of Paris, and the food was great. Really good. Honestly, from Mn, where all veggies come via “The Lettuce Train” I’ve come to the conclusion that even poorly made meals with fresh ingredients are so much better than what we get, it’s astounding.  The salad I had yesterday at the train station was as close to “meh” as I’ve had in France, and the “field greens” (like we get at the Co-Op in the big box?) were fresher than I can recall them at home.

Now we’re kind of wasting our only Saturday night in Paris, which might be a bit of a shame, but I have to go at her pace, and she’s had not only a week without internet, but a week in an utterly foreign land. I hope the lessons learned are...well, learned. Might start thinking of how to do a post-mortem on the trip when we fly home: we’ll have 10 hours to kill. Funny, too, because the LOCAL times when we leave and arrive will only differ by 3 hours!!! Ah, westward flight: such seeming economy, such a horror to adapt to. Good Night from Paris, and Thank You KMS for this experience.