La Tour Eiffel - the view from the top

Still processing pictures and some video from the brilliant Paris trip; there's about 300-odd pictures up on the Woolamaloo Flickr already (there you can click on the 'all sizes' button to see the full size versions, handy for detail on some of the aerial shots of the city) and I still have a number to sort and upload. Today though I uploaded some video clips I shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower. We walked up the first two levels - you can take stairs or the lift up the legs, so we opted to walk up just because hey, we can say we did! Final segment is by lift only and they run up the main central spire of the tower. The views, as you can imagine, are amazing - the whole of the City of Light spread out below you. The first one, looking north, is more than a little windy!



When we got to the west facing side we noticed a football match going on at a sports ground below - from this height it looked like a Subutteo game! Talk about grandstand seating...



Out of the wind on the south facing side looking down into the Parc des Champs and the Ecole Militaire with the Montparnasse Tower in the distance (an ugly modern building which most Parisians hate, but apparently gives great views of the Eiffel Tower from the top of it and if you are in it you don't see the ugliness of the modern tower, which is very out of keeping with the rest of its area), then pan round towards the Latin Quarter and Les Jardins de Luxembourg (which our hotel was next to) and the Pantheon (which has more than a passing resemblance to the front of St Paul's):




And of course a quick view looking Eastwards along the Seine towards Les Invalides and further in the distance Notre Dame:

And more Paris

I'm still beavering away processing and uploading pics of the Paris trip to my Flickr site - 184 up and I still have a ton to go, not even got as far as the Eiffel Tower pics yet. I was going to post a few of the ones I had one on here but blogger is arseing around and for some reason just not uploading images, although it seems happy to post video... So until it lets me put some more pics up and I get round to doing more pics on Flickr, here's another short video panorama of the Louvre, this time taken from the gardens between the wings and the famous Tullieres. As it turns round you get to see the Eiffel Tower in the distance over the top of one wing of the Louvre.



Darn it, I miss Paris, although it has to be said when you live in a city like Edinburgh having to leave Paris to go home isn't quite such a blow. I was suffering some withdrawal pangs though so towards the end of last week I wandered down to Haymarket not too far from me and into La March Francais, a French deli/cafe which fills up wine bottle right from the barrels and corks them then and there for a very reasonable rate and then parked my Magnificent Celtic Arse - or perhaps Le Derriere Celtic tre Magnifique - down for coffee and a read of my BD (Bandes Dessinee, basically comics and graphic novels) journal and felt much better. Why aren't I extremely rich so I could just keep an apartment in Paris and flit back and forth between there and Edinburgh whenever I felt like it? Real life, pah! Mind you, if I did I would need to import some Linda McCartney's since trying to eat veggie in Paris is a nightmare...

Spring time in Paris

Just back from the most fantastic long weekend in the City of Light, a place I've known in literature, art, photography and cinema for years but never actually been to. Standing on the Pont Neuf, the location for Les Amants de Pont Neuf, the French film where I first saw (and fell in love with) Juliette Binoche gave me such a rush (just the first of many French film actresses I've fallen in love with, French cinema has a habit of producing the most engaging leading ladies, from Catherine Deneuve to Audrey Tautou). Turning round as I walked along the Seine past all the little green lock-ups of the bouquinistes selling rare and second hand books, art prints and bande dessinee right there in the open air I can see the towers of Notre Dame, the edge of the Ile de la Cite, the Louvre and then suddenly a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. And for some reason it isn't until you finally see the Tower that you really, really feel like your are in Paris. And its a wonderful feeling. You're in Paris, its spring time and the sun is out and suddenly life is good...



More to come on Paris soon, I'm still kind of processing it all; late yesterday night I saw my last glimpse of the city from the air as we took off, the whole of Paris sparkling in the night and there was the Eiffel Tower, seen from the plane as we soared up into the night above France, glowing in the Parisian skyline, the great searchlight rotating on the top. An hour and a half later (and some nice red wine, merci Air France) descending through some clouds which clear to show the dark, night-time waters of the Forth and on the left Edinburgh lit up in the night and the Castle from the air, seemingly floating with the dark Castle Rock invisible from our height at night, only the floodlit battlements visible. I flew over the Eiffel Tower and Edinburgh Castle all lit up in the darkness within an hour and a half or so, even the simple act of the flight home was brilliant.

Two of the most beautiful cities in the world and I'm lucky enough that one of them is my home... More later and pics and vid to come, but I've only just started working on those and realised I took more than 2 gigs of images... Well, wouldn't you? And now I'm trying to get out of the habit of saying 'bonjour', 'merci' and 'au revoir' in any shop or bar I walk into... Missing Paris already...