With the right light, that huge iron tower seems to be made of fine lace.
Guessed which camp I’m in? Yeah, of course I climbed the stairs – and it probably was a good thing too, considering all the pastries and fries I’d had since our arrival ;)
Making it to the first floor wasn’t too hard. Except for the wave of vertigo that would take me when I’d start thinking too much about the structure I was in, I climbed the 328 steps like a real SF girl who’ve seen worst (San Francisco is a big stair fest). I was happy with myself and perfectly content to stay at this level, but Alex had other plans… He didn’t exactly tell me that while we were waiting in line to get in, but since he had already climbed the first floor on a previous visit, this time he wanted to go all the way up.
What good girlfriend could deny that to the man who had made this whole trip possible? Not that girlfriend… even if vertigo gave her butterflies well intent on eating her guts. My politic about vertigo is to never let it prevent me of doing something I really want to do – the problem is that sometime I don’t really want to do something that scares me, you know.
Here’s the step counts for the first and second floor 9_9
How very steampunk-looking, isn’t it?
I sucked it up – as well as the tiredness from climbing the stairs – and we made it to the 2nd floor. Is the view on the 2nd floor worth the 341 steps difference? Not really. At this distance, high is high, and a couple of meters more doesn’t have such a big impact on the view. It is, however, a necessary step to go to the 3rd and last floor… and if you go half way, there’s no reason not to go all the way…
A tilt shift effect and suddenly Paris looks like a doll’s playground…
It’s funny to look at Paris from above. There’s no really marked skyline, like many other city of this size would have. Except for the Montparnasse tower (the black building that looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in the picture below) and a small cluster in La Défense (the business district), there’s no skyscraper in Paris. You can see the city spread really far and it’s easy to recognize landmarks even from the lower floor. Everything looks so small, and since it’s pretty and very detailed, it kind of looks like the scale model of a fictional city designed by a mad civil engineer and his megalomaniac architect friend. The streets scatters like a web-shaped maze and there’s just so many beautiful buildings to look at.
The last floor is accessible through elevator only – relief! – and it is the most rewarding. The lift ride is very smooth and slow, but it doesn’t make it less scary. It climbs for 1 minute 40 seconds (if Wikipedia is right) during which I was sandwiched between a glass wall, my husband and the back of another tourist (it was a club sandwich). Now, the difference between the 2nd and 3rd floor is totally worth the extra 5 euros we had to pay to get there. I couldn’t find the exact number, but from the pictures, I can deduce it’s about 2 times as high as the previous floor, which changes the view quite a bit. If you’re too afraid or the wind bothers you, it’s possible to look out from the cabin where the elevator brings you.
It’s worth it to get out though. And not just because the view is better outside than through the blurry windows of the cabin…
That’s right… there’s champagne at the top! Of course, it’ll set you back 10 euros a glass, but then… you’re worth it – you just climbed 669 steps!
After a crazy photo shoot session with the champagne flutes (gotta get 20 euros of pictures out of them!), we made a toast for real: to being together, wherever that is.
And then we proceeded to climb down the 669 freakin’ steps -_-
