I’m a tourist. I’m in Paris. So obviously I visited the Eiffel tower. I’m not a maniac.
I had sort of figured that the Eiffel tower would be looming over the city wherever you go; nope. Unless you’re in the vicinity, you can’t see it. So it was actually several days into my stay here before I even saw it for the first time.
And yeah, it’s impressive. It’s one of those things that’s so iconic that actually being in its presence feels kind of special.
I thought about not actually going up the tower (the lines were pretty intense), but there are some things you just have to do.
You can either take the elevator or the steps — I figured taking the steps would be a bit more memorable, so that’s what I did (it helps that it costs four Euros less, and the line is considerably shorter).
It’s a lot of steps. You can’t actually take the stairs all the way to the very top, but you get high enough to get a pretty spectacular view (and I mean, it’s 669 steps. I think that’s enough).
There’s a spot at the top where you can stand on glass and you feel like you’re suspended in mid-air. The picture does a pretty terrible job of showing you what this was like, because it was terrifying. I’m only moderately afraid of heights, but I’ll admit I couldn’t stand on this for longer than about five seconds before a voice in my head was like “holy crap, get off get off getoffgetoffgetoff.”