Eiffel enfin!

Finally, the Eiffel Tower. Ella came to Paris with one idea - to go up the Eiffel Tower. In an uncharacteristic show of patience, she made it all the way until now without doing it. But today was a day off from school (Pentacost), so we set off early (in an attempt to beat the crowds) to go to the top of the tower.

Even though the lines were not terrible, the very top of the tower was already crowded, so we could only get tickets to the second level (still pretty high). Jonah was relieved that we couldn't go all the way to the top, becauswe he was afraid that being at the very top of the tower would be "too pokey," (i.e., that the antenna on the top of the tower would poke us). We took the elevator all the way up to the second floor and spent some time checking out the incredible view from up there. Ella wondered if we could see Ohio from up there. Not quite, but we could see quite a bit of Paris, naturally. We walked around the deck and ate a chocolate crepe (Ella was very surprised by the fact that one could get a crepe on top of the tower . She was in general surprised by how solid the tower was (I think she imagined it would be more like climbing on an erector set), and how much there was to do up there. Then, we went down to the first level. The view is still quite nice and there is a lot to see and do on the first level. We mailed a couple of postcards from the post office, watched a video of the 2000 new years eve fireworks on the tower, manipulated a camera mounted on the side of the tower and watched the view on a video screen, and saw a 180 degree movie on the building of the tower. Jonah fell asleep in the stroller towards the end of our visit. We took him down the tower asleep, took him on the metro asleep, went all the way back to our neighborhood, and he woke up, somewhat groggy in the middle of a pizza lunch. He ate lunch and we went outside. Jonah looked around somewhat amazed, and asked, "Wow, are we still on top of the Eiffel tower?"