I considered this as I walked around the heart of the Paris for my first time, comfortable with being dwarfed by the ancestory of all that surrounded me, seeing as I do not make it a habit of getting into pissing contests with prominent European cities. This was a new world to me. The buildings – the colour of their old, stone walls dulled from a life spent watching and weathering – had obvious age in their appearance and architecture that housed any number of stories that I, due to my vast ignorance of history, had largely no idea about. Even the old, rundown buildings held some kind of diginity in their dilapidation.
The plan we had devised for tonight, after consulting our Lonely Planet book – the Bible which served as our only real source of touris information – to visit the Musee D'orsay. From my impressively limited degree of knowledge, I believed it to be some kind of art museum, one of the only things that the guide book seemed to suggest would still be open at the time of evening we were currently inhabiting and somewhere that had come highly recommended by Diamond and the plethora of graffiti she had donated to the pages of the Paris section of the Lonely Planet book. Surprisingly very little of these recommendations were for Bordellos, but one can only suppose she kept that information to herself.
After round two with Parisian public transport, which was a far less traumatic affair than what my arrival had gifted me with, we were now walking alongside the river – the name of which I am constantly successful in forgetting – that divided the city centre. The sun was setting as we walked – my legs momentarily distracted from their weariness of a day of too many footsteps and too much luggage – and as blue and pink fought for dominance of the sky, I couldn't help but feel, in my own narcissitic way, that Paris had gone and prettied herself up in her Sunday best just for me. The thousands of other people roaming the streets at the same time were nothing but voyeurs intruding upon our special moment. Perverts.
Without anymore buildings to hide behind, no more escape from the prying eyes of the new tourists who scoured the horizon looking for it, the Eiffel Tower edged its way into view, bringing with it the announcement that, yes, you were indeed in Paris. This was not some kind of imposter European city put together as some kind of elaborate hoax by what must have been quite an industrial group of con artists and gypsies.
Well, no shit, Eiffel Tower, but thanks for the reminder I suppose.
With the time taken up by me craning my neck in various directions and my camera whoring itself out to any view that would take it, we now found ourself at the museum that also doubled as our destination. Something was amiss though, in that it appeared suspiciously closed. So suspicious it was, that it was very quickly found guilty of the fact. It would seem that either deceit of idiocy was afoot surrounding the Lonely Planet book. It would later be found that the book did say that the museum was closed on a Sunday night, and my ability to read would be brought into question, but I still staunchly defend my position that someone broke into the hotel room and rewrote that portion of the book while we were out.
At this point though, with our plans dashed and the book still serving as a competent scapegoat, a continued walk around the city to see the sights became the newly amended plan. Bren and Rob had already been to Paris for a day during their Contiki tour, so their vague idea of where things were was a slight improvement upon my directional impulse of closing my eyes and pointing in a random direction.
So with some various buildings and a chance meeting with one of Rob's former Brisbane workmates – an indicent that would have made Karl proud – the only things in between, we made our way to the Champs Elysees, what basically amounts to the most expensive street in Paris. With shopfronts that screamed very loudly that I didn't belong there – Louis Vuitton, Versace and other small words worth far too much money – and restaurants that don't display their menus based on the idea that if you need to ask the prices, you can't afford them, this was an avenue of excess, a place for those who could afford the accessories to go with their $1,000-a-day drug habit and high class female escorts. Even the shitty souveneir store that had managed to snake its way in there was even more ridiculously overpriced than those stores tend to be.
At the end of the Champs Elysees, there was the Arc du Triomphe, a hulking archway surrounded by what can be described as nothing less than chaos moulded into the form of a traffic roundabout.
A cobblestone circle with a width that could range anywhere from six to eight cars, depending on how adventurous the drivers are feeling, it is traffic anomaly guided by no lines, rules or logic of any kind. People drive onto and off of it based entirely on their own whim, and it is simply a matter of fending for oneself in order to get out of the mess that you misguidedly decided to drive yourself into. Apparently insurers won't give you full converage if you drive on it because, well, they like to remain in business.
It's said that, on average, there's an accident on this roundabout every 45 seconds. Armed with this knowledge, and the same appetite for destruction that drived people to watch car racing, we decided to stand around and watch to see if we could witness the statistics in action. Sadly, the portion of time that we watched for left the statistics with a lot of catching up to do later that night. All we managed to witness was aggressive driving that bordered on a necessity for anger management, panicked tourist who has suddenly realised what they'd gotten themselves into and sat stationary in the middle, hazard lights flashing meekly, and finally, cyclists boldly pedalling their way into the madness, having obviously given up any will to live or sanity long ago.
Our disappointment in the lack of carnage motivated us to move forward, onward to what could be considered the main event. With the black of night long moved in, settling the battle for colour supremecy of the sky, the Eiffel Tower was popping out from behind entirely different sets of buildings, now illuminated blue and demanding the attention it was shying away from earlier. A spinning beam of light also stretched out from the Tower's peak, serving as a beacon to get us there and also the possible cause of numerous faraway shipwrecks as they mistook it for a lighthouse.
Approaching the Tower, glowing against the backdrop of the night sky, it looks almost exactly as one would expect, yet no less dimished in its granduer. As we lined up get to get some food – something we'd been meaning to do for several hours now – Brendan advised me to keep my eye on the Tower, for reasons I was not sure of. So I fixed my gaze, only occasionally distracted by purchasing my food and by the illegal street merchants brushing past me as they sprinted from the police. Just as I was beginning to think it was all a ploy by Brendan to see how long he could have me staring expectantly and looking like an idiot, thousands of flashing lights suddenly lit up the Eiffel Tower, a spectacle which at the same time sent all Parisian epileptics into simultaneous seizures.
Widespready medical calamities aside, it was quite a spectacle to behold, though once I realised exactly how extended the spectacle was, I decided to stop filming it with my camera, wanting to still have to space left on it to continue with the gratuitous amount of images I had been capturing.
Now standing at the base of the Tower and staring up, the effect was quite vertigo-inducing, which led one to wonder exactly what the sensation would be like looking down. I donated little time to this wondering attitude, seeing I would be finding that answer out for myself when I returned for part two of my Paris visit in a week a a half's time. Knowing the city would be hungry for more of me once I departed, I had scheduled a return stop after spreading my love and communicable diseases throughout various other destinations around the country.
My eyes now weary from losing themselves in the criss-crossing mazes of steel that collectively called itself the Eiffel Tower, my feet exhausted (and for all I knew, bleeding into my shoes) from a day of constant assault from the pathways beneath them, the general consensus of my body was that it was time for retreating to the hotel room. By this stages, the influence the rest of my body had over my brain was something I simply couldn't compete with, so with Bren, Rob and I sporting a set of three matching mindsets, we set our sights on the destination of our hotel room, and the promise of sleep within.
Now...which way was the hotel again?
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