france part three

P A R I S :
our hotel was in lovely walking distance to notre dame. just walk that way down rue cardinal lemoine, cross the bridge and look to your left. it was raining intermittently. fran fired up her first paris cigarette. on the bridge we looked to our left and there it was. i remembered my few-hours' layover in 1991 when i was on my way to russia. i wrote this in my journal then:
"I am sitting in a park next to Notre Dame. It is so beautiful and cool here today... This is my life! This is how my life is unfolding. Children begin running all around me."
i felt happy to have another chance in paris, since the last visit had been so brief. it was also nice to experience it with friends instead of alone.
notre dame, immense and full of relics and tourists, with its luminous windows and intricate carvings and massive arches, was a little bit of a circus. from there we hopped on a riverboat and began wending our way toward the eiffel tower. if i thought notre dame was a circus, then the eiffel tower was definitely disneyland. first of all, that thing is quite huge-- you know how some people get disappointed when they see the statue of liberty for real; they're like, 'i thought it would be bigger.' well, i didn't feel that with the eiffel tower. people were teeming under its legs, standing in long lines waiting to get to a leg, each of which contains an elevator. when we finally got through the line, and up to the 'second' level, we had to exit the elevator and stand in another line in order to get to the top of the tower. the quarters were generally crammed; people with claustrophobia wouldn't do well here; all around us american, german, spanish, french voices. up top the view was nice and everything, and it was a little staggering to think how high we were. 'look, there's the pompidou!' said fran. 'look at the clouds!' said andy. 'i'm freezing!' said zoe. and it was cold up there.
coming down from the top was equally fraught with lines and cramped standing room. once we got back down to level two, and were waiting for the elevator to go all the way down to the bottom, a cold, sideways rain began to whip through the waiting area. some of us opened umbrellas. people squealed and giggled in different languages. and when the elevator came, there was a bit of a crush. fran almost got caught behind a guard rail, as did a small spanish child next to me. but we made it down safely.
i, for one, was happy to have my feet back on french soil after that. and then on french water as we rode the riverboat back to the notre dame stop, where we got off the boat and walked back to our hotel.