Day Four and we’re out of Disney days. I had lay in bed, awake, for a long time – partly coming to terms with the message/call I’d received from my Uncle (and the series of ‘what ifs’ that had played out in my head), partly trying to figure out what we could actually do today, if we couldn’t get to the Eiffel Tower, etc.
We left the hotel room later than previous days and headed into Paris. I had thought to myself (and perhaps even said to Connor) that the level of busking/homeless/con-artists on this trip were dramatically reduced from previous trips. A pleasant thing. Even around Marne-la-Vallée you could usually find some people hanging around the station, hoping to prey on unsuspecting tourists, but this time? Nothing.
Nothing until today, that is. We swapped from the RER to Metro at Nation, aiming for Montparnasse station. Along the way, a homeless guy got on, with a… Unique aroma… and started asking around for money, before moving his way down the train, making sure to touch Connor as he went, and finding a seat. The rest of the journey was accompanied by his beautiful singing voice.
Exiting at Montparnasse, we grabbed some food from a supermarket nearby (in which Connor also took a shit in a toilet with no roof), before eating said lunch at the open plaza area in front of the station.
The plan from there was to go to the Eiffel Tower and see if we could get up without a having pre-booked a ticket. We walked from Montparnasse down to the Eiffel Tower. We’d already seen it yesterday, but since the last time I was in Paris (2015), they’ve built a large glass wall around the base of the tower. ‘Cause terrorism.
Arriving from the Champs de Mars side, we walked down the right of the tower to find a massive queue, that itself would have been over an hour long, at least, queuing to get into the area beneath the tower. A sign along that queue also seemed to indicate that you couldn’t get in without a ticket.
We sat down on the grass near where the queue was formed. I was feeling pretty defeated (and also sore, my feet were killing me). Connor insisted we have a look at the other side, to see if there was another entrance there. We went and there was. This time with a much shorter queue. Still no guarantee of getting up the tower, but we were at least allowed into the base area.
Once in, we found that there was a ticket booth for lift access (because was I fuck walking up the steps). It said that the queue time would be approximately an hour to get the tickets, but that was fine, so long as we were getting them. I’m sure that timeframe would have been accurate, too, had they not decided to just close up shop at some point while we queued.
Tickets in hand, we made our way to the lift, passing through security again with a sign letting you know that no knives were allowed. Given that we had to go through security to get to this point, how we were meant to have knives on us, I’m not sure… But also, why there was a bucket full of knives by this sign… I’m also not sure.
We went to the top. We viewed the views. We came back down.
In part, I think, due to the wall around the tower, causing bottlenecks in the pathways around it, the amount of people trying to sell you shit, the ‘string’ guys, etc seemed to be worse than I’d ever seen it before and for both of us, getting away from them all became the number one priority.
We sat near The Seine for a bit. I had thought about going over to Montmartre, seeing the Moulin Rouge and going up to the Sacré-Cœur, but I was sore, the chances of what we’d just escaped around the Eiffel Tower being just as bad over there and the fact that Connor didn’t really care about it, meant we made the decision to just head back to the hotel.
We stopped off at a little Chinese supermarket in Bussy, on the way. I was fully aware that it was a Chinese place, but I figured it’d have a snack/juice section the same as any other supermarket. While it had a few items though, it didn’t have nearly as much as I thought it might.
Back in the room, we dropped off the snacks we had and decided to head to Val d’Europe for food. There was a pizza place near to the RER station that looked alright (turns out it was pretty much in the RER station). Service was fine, pizza was decent. We hit up the supermarket across the street for more snacks (far too many snacks, given that we were checking out in a little over 12hrs and had to sleep in that time, too) and went back to the hotel to eat more and watch TV.
It was a much slower paced day, and perhaps slightly less disappointing than I’d imagined, given that we got up the tower. Still, Paris lacked the charm it’s had on every other visit for me. I don’t know if it was extra covid regulations still in place, just the amount of people going around in what was always going to be a busy time or what… Visiting at a quieter time might answer those questions, or just go on to show that it’s no longer a city I like being in. We’ll see.
Tomorrow: Home time!