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My first visit to Paris was brief: just a couple of days between London and a month long assignment in Brussels...

Paris!

Hank Shiffman
2003-11-26 17:43:05

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My first visit to Paris was brief: just a couple of days between London and a month long assignment in Brussels. My first impression was of a city designed to dwarf humanity, with avenues too wide to cross and huge buildings with vast empty spaces between them. (My first impression of the city's residents was also less than positive. Fortunately, I've since had opportunity to revise that view.) One thing that did not disappoint: my first view of the Eiffel Tower at night. The Tower is one of very few structures that is more impressive in fact than it is in pictures. Lit up against the Parisian sky, it seems a natural part of its environment. Hard to believe that the residents of the time were shocked and dismayed by its construction and the negative effect it would have on the look of the city.

My hotel on that first visit was off the Champs Elysee. Which meant that I didn't have far to go to see the only other landmark I could identify without question: the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc sits in the middle of the Place d'Etoile, a huge traffic circle at the intersection of the Champs Elysee and a hundred or so other roads. Etoile must be French for snarl, which is what the traffic does. And so do the drivers. My one experience driving in Paris required that I cross the Place at rush hour. Like any rational human being, I entered the circle and proceeded to follow its curve until I reached my exit. Thereby proving that I was a tourist, as the entire population of Paris cut across my path, following a straight line between their entrance and exit points. I think I was cut off more times in those ninety seconds than in my life either before or since. After that I parked the car and stayed to the sidewalks, which on the Champs Elysee are every bit as wide as the road.

Friends told me that whatever else I might do, I just had to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, that the views were spectacular and worth whatever hassle was involved. These images support that advice. Whatever else one might feel about Paris, it is a breathtakingly beautiful city. Especially on a clear day from a thousand feet up.

I've never known what to make of the French sense of humor. I'm sure they must have one, although judging by their cinema it's pretty different from our own. But any long walk around Paris leads you to the inescapable conclusion that their sense of the absurd leaves ours in the dust. How else to explain the glass pyramid that stands in the courtyard of the Louvre? What other society would take a grand collection of monuments that runs in straight line from the Louvre through the Egyptian obelisk at the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe and finish it off with the Grande Arche de La Défense, a giant cardboard box of a building that's missing the front and back flaps? Or would pay good money for a twelve foot high bronze thumb? Now that's a sense of humor!