We paid 45 French Francs each for another night at the Youth Hostel and set off along the Rue de Turbigo (The name of this route perpetuates the memory of the Battle of Turbigo, victory over the Austrians on June 2, 1859.) down to the River Seine.
We were side-tracked into visiting the Centre Nationale D’Art ed de Culture George Pompidou. The Centre Pompidou, also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil, and the Marais. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini.
It houses the Bibliothèque publique d'information (Public Information Library), a vast public library; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is the largest museum for modern art in Europe; and IRCAM, a centre for music and acoustic research.
It is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who commissioned the building, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
As a couple of peasants, we found it to be a horrific arty modern building that looked as if it was still surrounded by scaffolding. Acres of glass frontage and external escalators in glass tubes, together with blue periscope-like ventilators made the exhibition hall look like a giant animal cage.
We joined the crowd which flooded in at 10:00 hrs. as if it was the start of the Winter Sale at Selfridges on the opening morning rather than an art gallery. (Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of high-end department stores in the United Kingdom that was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1908. The flagship store on London's Oxford Street is the second largest shop in the UK (after Harrods) and opened on 15 March 1909).
We had a quick shifty at an Art Bookstall, but then spotted a pay booth which deterred us from further exploration. We left for a coffee in a Q-Burger joint and watched garish pop videos that seemed to feature prominently male transvestites.
We walked along the bank of the River Seine intrigued by the elaborate houseboats which ranged from monster barges to a floating potting shed. We reached the Eiffel Tower and loitered in the Parc du Champ de Mars waiting for someone who looked as if they knew what they were doing to get a photo of the pair of us in front of the tower.
Opened in 1780, the Parc du Champ-de-Mars extends from the École Militaire to the Eiffel Tower. A hotspot for national events, it can be accessed freely and offers the most beautiful view of the capital’s landmark monument. Parisians and tourists gather on its lawns to picnic, play music, and watch the Eiffel Tower’s twinkling lights at nightfall.
The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair, it was initially criticised by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world.
The tower is 324 metres (1,063 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris. Its base is square, measuring 125 metres (410 ft) on each side. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building in New York City was finished in 1930. It was the first structure to reach a height of 300 metres.
The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world, but we opted not to pay and recrossed the River Seine. Jogging along the river seemed to be the order of the day and we dodged roller skaters in the grounds of the Palais de Chaillot, a building at the top of the Chaillot Hill in the Trocadéro area in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
We continued north to the landmark Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile is one of the most famous monuments in Paris, France, standing at the western end of the Champs-Élysées at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle, formerly named Place de l'Étoile—the étoile or "star" of the juncture formed by its twelve radiating avenues.
The location of the arc and the plaza is shared between three arrondissements, 16th (south and west), 17th (north), and 8th (east). The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.
From here we trudged wearily back along the Boulevard Hausmann. We had a break in McDonalds which was well overstaffed. A girl was employed to write down your order on a card for you to present to the cashier, another to arrange the chairs and another in top hat and tails to act as doorman. Kids with flags and balloons squealed joyfully around us, dining at the expense of good old dad, as we watched through the big windows the passing fancy dress cavalcade passing by on the street outside. Everyone appeared to be dressed up to the nines for a winter walk up the overcast Parisian main street.
We returned to the Youth Hostel and dozed until dusk. Back on the streets again in the evening we headed for the Gare du Nord so that George could change up some more money into French Francs. On the way back from the station, which was cluttered with litter, we took on board a mega-slab of nutty chocolate, some walnuts and a cheap bottle of French red wine.
It was still raining when we got back to the Youth Hostel and returned to our room. We hit the vino and looked through my 35mm slide transparencies and realised just how much we had accomplished in the last five months. We had a brief chat with our roommate who was from Richmond in Surrey in England and got to a suitably drowsy state to blot out the loud brashness coming from the Aussie gaggle in the next room.
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