Tower Interrupted

The rest of "monuments day" on our France trip actually featured fewer monuments than planned.

We had a couple of hours to kill before timed tickets to ascend the Eiffel Tower (that we'd secured in advance). We decided to fill them with another recommendation we'd be given before the trip: a visit to Chartreuse Paris-Vauvert. It's a tasting room dedicated to the green (or yellow) French liqueur -- a place where you can try a mixed flight of their more common varieties and more limited small batches. You can also order from a menu of Chartreuse cocktails, and pick up bottles at a far cheaper price than you find in the U.S.

As we were enjoying our drinks, the "misfortune of the day" arrived. An email came in to let us know that the Eiffel Tower was experiencing delays for "operational reasons" and we might not be able to get in at our reserved time. Should we not get to go up the tower, don't worry, our ticket purchase would be refunded automatically. There were a bunch of other "wiggle words" in there that left me with the impression that they'd opened late or something, and so the thing to do would be show up anyway and hope it all worked out.

It did not. When we arrived, the Tower was closed. You could still go through security screening and enter the park area directly beneath the structure, but no one was going up by stairs or elevator to any level. And from the "Operational Reasons" signs everywhere, it was clear no one was going to go up.

We wouldn't learn until the next day that we'd been caught up in something almost as quintessentially French as the Eiffel Tower itself: a workers' strike. It seems that a religious group had recently visited the Tower, and female employees were instructed to stay out of their sight. In response, the workers chose the one day we had tickets to stage their understandable protest. An official statement issued the next day sliced the bologna really thin: “To the best of our knowledge, at no point was anyone prevented access to the Eiffel Tower." I don't know about you, but when you think "I'm going to go to the Eiffel Tower," then unless you have a fear of heights, you aren't thinking "to just stand under it and look up." (It is kind of an interesting view, though.)

It was easier to accept our bad luck once we found out the reason for the closure later on. We'd have to settle for the picture from the start of this post. (Instead of "cheese," we were saying "we got screwed.") But... put a pin in this topic, because it'll come around again later in the travelogue.

We decided to do some shopping with the sudden gap in our afternoon. We liked the idea of looking for clothes that weren't necessarily "touristy," but were of a somewhat different style than you readily find back home. Something you could wear in the future, and you would know it was a trip souvenir, but no one else would.

When it came time for dinner, we decided to include an appetizer of escargot. (Had to do it at least once during the trip, right?) They tasted good enough, but the amount of work involved was pretty high. You'd have to eat a lot of escargot to build the dexterity required.

We wandered a bit in the area of our hotel, and finally ended our night with an unexpected stop at a speakeasy called Moonshiner. You literally walk into a pizza place, nod politely to the staff, and head directly for the door of their walk-in freezer.... which, when opened, actually takes you to a dark-but-classy bar.

I sort of find the idea of a speakeasy a bit silly, but there was something surreal and next level about visiting one in France. You guys never even had Prohibition like America, you know? I mean, can you even imagine the French giving up their wine? Our (stupid) "culture" is not your costume! But the cocktails were pretty good, and a nice way to end the day.