Last month I went to Paris!
I’ve already covered the Eiffel Tower and today I’m going up the Arc de Triomphe.
I first went up there when I was fourteen. I have photos and in case there’s any doubt, the photos are in an album with captions like “roofs from Arc”. But I don’t remember it at all. I considered it when I went to Paris in the summer with my sister but summer crowds are crazy. January crowds, however…
I went to the Arc de Triomphe because I was a solo tourist in Paris and I’d never had the opportunity to run around doing the sights at my own speed and I’d never seen Paris in winter. I never intended to go up it – that you can go up it just won’t stay in my mind and it always surprises me again when I get there. I crossed the Place de l’Etoile via the underpass, because I have no desire to get killed on the road, and while I was crossing I saw that the ticket queue was unbelievably short and… well, I thought I might as well.
I took out my card in the queue, got to the front, bought a ticket and turned to go up the stairs, only to be stopped by two men by the door who pointed back at the counter where I’d paid. Had I failed to collect something? Had I forgotten something? They were pointing at a €2 coin on the floor. I knew perfectly well it wasn’t me who’d dropped it – I’d put my wallet back in my bag long before I reached the front and anyway, I didn’t have €2 in coins in total. I’m a princess, I don’t often carry cash. But the chances of finding its true owner seemed slim and the men were quite insistent so I retrieved it.
The queue to the door was a bit longer. There was airport-style security here. Well, there was a metal detector and a person checking bags in that half-hearted way people often do at places that aren’t airports, where if you haven’t put your Suspicious Item right on the top you’ll get away with it. Even so, it took quite a lot of time and when I got through, I was faced with stairs.
The Arc de Triomphe was built between 1806 and 1836. I believe it does have a lift in one of the legs but mostly access is via spiral stairs. Climbing St Olaf’s Church in Tallinn has given me something of an aversion (bordering on but not quite reaching phobia) to spiral stairs but these were ok. There were just so many of them! I thought if I took it gently I could get to the top. Well, I knew I could get to the top, it was just a question of how long it took. I think I got two thirds of the way up before my legs and lungs simultaneously stopped working and after that, it was a panting lurch up the rest of the way, stopping every half a dozen steps.
It felt like a triumph to get to the top. And at the top is a big room! I never knew there were rooms inside. I fully expected to emerge straight onto the roof. It turns out a large room to function as a museum was built into the original plans and this wasn’t even that room. This was a sort of antechamber. Half a floor down was an exhibition of French military uniforms (which I skipped, to be honest). There were carvings, leftovers from the original construction. There was a video of other triumphal arches around the world. There were toilets! There was a defibrillator (and I did feel a little in need of it, after the climb). There was a video screen set into the floor showing the view from a camera set into the underside of the arch, showing what was going on right under my feet and I immediately knew what I was going to do with that later.
And there were two vending machines. Not for drinks – these were for commemorative coins. I often look at machines like this and decide not to bother but these coins were €2. I’d acquired €2 coming here and if you’re going to commemorate anything, it may as well be a climb you didn’t think you’d survive. They’re good chunky coins, too. They’re not a penny pressed through rollers, they’re minted by the official people who make the real currency and they weigh a ton.
Upstairs was the museum. There’s not much there – a commemorative wall, a couple of information boards and a gift shop. Of course there’s a gift shop!
Finally, you go up more stairs and you’re out on the roof. Even on a foggy day like Friday, it’s quite a view. The Arc de Triomphe is bigger than I think it is – I can stand for half an hour on the other side of the road just marvelling at the size of the thing before I even start looking at the detail. So of course, you can see for miles. You can see right down to Place de la Concorde in the east, although the big wheel and the top obscured the view down to the Pyramid. And you can see right up to the Grande Arche at La Defense in the west. Not to mention all the way round to just about every Paris landmark.
And right there is the Eiffel Tower! It’s such a stereotypical Parisian view, the sort you expect to see photoshopped into every film with so much as a single scene set in Paris (there’s one such in Mission Impossible 5, which I watched yesterday) but it’s real. It’s right there! It does look a little further away on my camera but I consulted my old photos from my school trip and my old film camera captured the distance accurately.
What’s interesting about the top is that it’s neither flat as I expected or bevelled, as per the top of the model arch I bought when I was about eight. There’s a kind of ledge around the edge so you can look out but the rest of the floor slopes up and down randomly. If my knees didn’t feel up to jumping up onto the ledge, I could find a slope to follow up and then walk round. That did result in some people tripping over each other but never mind.
I don’t know how many circuits I made of the roof. Lots. Well, it was enough of a climb that I wasn’t going down until I was properly sick of the view. It takes a while to get sick of a view over the top of Paris, anyway. Even when I did descend, I considered running back up again before I went down the spiral staircase.
Oh, that was fun! When one is nervous about spiral staircases and heights, going downwards is a little bit scary. I kept one hand on the rail on my right and one hand on the central spiral on my left and if anyone seemed to want to pass, I shrank myself right back against the wall. Going down is bad for my knees too – not because the effort wears them out but because I’m fighting gravity the whole way. Too many stairs always makes my legs quiver and they kept it up for fully twenty-four hours.
Once I was back on solid ground, I prowled the open and obvious parts of the arch for a while. Made another unsuccessful attempt at taking a panoramic photo down the road, up the arch over my head and down the road on the other side but my camera likes to be moved in one dimension only when it takes panoramas. I viewed the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, I looked at the ornate carvings on the outer walls and then I went back to the middle and looked up.
Right in the middle of the inside of the arch, half-disguised among the ceiling roses, is a camera pointing right downwards, the one they’re looking at on the screen in the floor upstairs. I stood directly underneath it, look straight up at it and then waved. I hope someone saw and was alarmed, or at least entertained, because I know I looked an idiot to the people on the ground.
I’m so glad I went up the Arc de Triomphe because if you’ve done a thing once, it’s nice to be able to remember, even if that means you need to do it a second time. If I go back to Paris again, I might even do it a third time.
Did you know I wrote a book? I wrote a book! It’s about my journey from Helsinki to Reykjavik by train, boat, dog-sled, searching for adventures and the Northern Lights. And it’d be really good if people would read it.
