Paris is called the City of Lights, and the shining example of this is the elegant and iconic Eiffel Tower brilliantly lit at night. We skipped the day trip (and the crowds) to La Tour Eiffel and instead visited at night where the tower was bathed by a warm yellow glow. Every hour, on the hour, there was a light show which consisted of blinking white lights over the entire structure, I think this takes away from the beauty of the Eiffel Tower, and it for sure confuses my camera.

It was late in the evening (9ish) and even the African souvenir peddlers were starting to walk to the Métro station. Of the four elevators, one in each leg, only the North one was still open. We lined up to buy our tickets to the first level (4,5€) and then waited another 30-40 minutes to get on the elevator. Once on the elevator, we honestly were planning to get off on the first floor, but were rather confused with the setup. The elevators were multi-level, and it wasn’t clear to me why there was a differentiation. We lined up for the bottom one, since we were going to the first level, Once we were on the elevator, it made a stop and the operator announced something that sounded like this is the stop for the first level restaurant, but I couldn’t hear very well.

Anyways we didn’t get off and the elevator kept going. Sooner than we knew it, we arrived at the second level. Oops. I was a bit worried about this because we had a two-stage ticket, meaning it was ripped once to get on the elevator, and there was still a second rip available (for the return trip?). In the end, it didn’t matter because they let everyone on the elevator.

I think “views” are overrated, whether they are at night or day, cloudy or otherwise. It was a nice night so I took a couple of long exposures. I mentioned before that it was rather windy, in fact it was so windy that we couldn’t go to one side of the tower at all! Fortunately there is a central area that is enclosed from the wind. There was also a unsheltered “second floor” (which explains the multi-level elevator) and there were a lot of people up there; but they must have been nuts to stand around in the wind waiting for the elevator to go down.

We were lucky because there weren’t a lot of people at night, but even then the line for the elevator spread into the middle of the area. I can’t imagine what it would be like to visit during tourist season with all four elevators operating!

Once we got back down to ground level, we had another adventure heading back to our hotel. We decided to take the train (RER) instead of the Métro because we would only have to make 1 transfer; however, trains are not as straight forward since you have to figure out which track and which train to go on. We accomplished those two challenges, but didn’t realize our train was a “Court”. What does that mean? Well it was a short (in length) train which stopped at the beginning of the platform, so by the time we walked to the train, it left. I don’t feel too bad though, we met another (Southern) American family and another Frenchmen who failed the same test! And we did eventually make it back before the transit stopped running.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, europe, france, france08, travelling