Ahhh Paris! Day 1

To my surprise, we were rewarded for our suffering with 1 1/2 days in Paris, one of the greatest cities I’ve ever visited. The weather was perfect as we took the Metro into the city center. We first had a snack at a small café, then walked along the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. One of the couriers wanted to take the elevator to the top, so we obliged, waiting in a series of lines for well over an hour. Once at the top, the views were magnificent, if a little vertiginous, but the most frightening feature of the tower’s highest level were the wax figure mannequins of Alec Eiffel and his colleagues pouring over their blueprints. Proud of his accomplishment back in the late 19th century, Eiffel had an office in the tower’s highest point. So the French decided it best to use several very lifelike figures to tell this story. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a little weirded out, to say the least, by mannequins, so their presence was startling, yet somehow intriguing.

We finally returned to the ground just after dusk and proceeded to walk to Montparnasse, the neighborhood where Sandy and I had stayed (at the Hotel de Bains) back in the summer of 2003. Our destination was the Bistro du Dome, a seafood and fish restaurant where we had eaten on that trip. Though the walk was long (I recommended a taxi, but no one took me up on it), everyone seemed to enjoy what was a delicious dinner of oysters, mussels in curry sauce, and a variety of fishes, ranging from sea bass to skate (a strangely bony fish with succulent white meat). Afterward, we enjoyed a nutella crepe on the Boulevard Montparnasse before taking the long subway ride back to our hotel.