I headed into Paris at about 11:30 this morning and finally dragged my weary self back into the school at 9:00 tonight. And other than the 15 minute train ride each way, I was pretty much on my feet the whole time. Yikes! There are many, many pictures to go through, so here are just a couple from the Eifel tower for starters. I started the day with two of my classmates. We went together to L'hotel de Ville (the city hall) which normally isn't open to the public. That was probably the coolest thing I saw today. They had a lot of information about each of the rooms. Everything was quite ornate... not quite like the Sauk Centre city hall! There was also a very neat demonstration of handicapped sports going on in the plaza outside. Then my classmates and I parted company. They got lunch and I maneuvered my way to the Palais-Royal, another building that is not normally open to the public. The city hall was massive, but this complex is HUGE!!! I'm not sure how many city blocks it occupies, but it must be a couple at least. A number of royal families lived in it over the years, and now it is the home of several government departments. It was really strange looking at ancient, ornate decorations lining the wall of a room and then a Beatles cd box set sitting on the desk in the middle of the room.
I had originally hoped to also get to the Hôtel de Béhague, which was owned by a woman with too much time and money who traveled all around the world collecting the best of everything she found and piling it up in her mansion. However, it took me too long to get through the line at the Palais-Royal. So I meandered back, getting some pictures of the Louvre as I went by. I hadn't realized that it has a massive park behind it, complete with some kind of victory arch. It isn't the Arc de Triomphe (though I did see that in the distance) but a smaller one with some dude on top of it who I presume to be Napolean. The sun was shining through the clouds in a very pretty way, so I took pictures of a couple of angel statues on top of Louvre that looked very neat. Only later did I realize that both were female and one didn't have any clothes on her top half... so she got deleted. Maybe I'm over-sensitive, but I was exposed to way too many naked bodies today. Some places were worse than others. The park beside the Louvre was so strewn with nude statues that I went through about as fast as I could, though I did stop to take pictures of the sailboats in the fountain. What a fantastic idea! we need to do that in the US.
I finally got to the Eifel Tower and decided not to pay the $5 to walk the stairs to the first and second floors. The line was long and I wasn't sure I would be able to get up there before sunset anymore. Besides, I wanted to get pictures of the tower in the sunset, which I couldn't do if I were on it.
So I wandered out onto the park between the tower and the École Militaire. It is a very long park, I suppose comparable to the Mall in Washington D.C. So I kept walking and walking, and every once in a while I would turn around and take more pictures of the tower as the sun set. I also had a delightful, though short, chat with a pleasant older woman who told me (in French) that she had hosted several American students before. I had a hard time figuring out what else she said.
There was some kind of peace concert going on at the military school (go figure) and also at the event were a whole bunch of people doing various kinds of juggling. So I watched them for a little bit, took a couple last pictures of the tower, and then headed back to my train stop as quickly as I could. By now it was getting dark and I was taking back streets that didn't always run straight, so I wasn't 100% sure that I was going were I needed to go. I eventually hit the river, right about where I had planned to do so, and saw Notre Dame up ahead. Then I saw a sign for the RER (not where I expected it, but I'm not picky) and headed in. I punched my one and only ticket home and then realized that I may or may not have gone to the right place. The sign listed the name of my town, but which way was the train going? If it was going towards CDG airport, and it kind of looked that way, then I was on the platform for the wrong train. This suspicion was suddenly dwarfed when the train pulled into the station and it looked wrong. It wasn't just going in the wrong direction, I think it was going to other cities. Like possibly in Belgium. Fortunately I saw a sign for the good old RER that goes where I need to go and ran down the stairs. All of this confusion was accented by the fact that somewhere long ago I had read that the trains stop running at 9:00. It had taken me significantly longer to get back from the tower than I had anticipated and it was now approaching 8:45. I got down to the platform just as a train pulled in. I checked the signs. It was going to my stop! So I hopped on. In a a couple minutes it became apparent that it was the last train of the night. After we went through most of the stations, including mine, their signs turned off.
Praise God that I got to the station at exactly the right time! If I had been delayed even a little more on my trip home, or if I hadn't seen the RER sign, or if the WRONG train hadn't come exactly when it did and tipped me off to the fact that I was in the wrong place, I have no clue how I would have gotten home. I know nothing about the bus systems around here and I wasn't carrying either a credit card or enough cash to hire a cab.
But now I am home, and tired, and I'm going to bed. Good night!
John
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