"La Tour Eiffel at Sunset" (2011)
The Eiffel Tower is so well known, I expected that the mere sight of it in person would call up too many clichés for me to clearly be able to experience it for myself. I was wrong. La Tour Eiffel looms over and throughout the city. You can see it from Montemartre and any other place where you can get somewhat of an aerial view of Paris. For a the first couple of days, I kind of ignored it. The tower just seemed to be so ever-present, I didn’t see much point in venturing out solely to see it. But eventually I decided to go, thinking it stupid not to see something so quintessentially Parisian when I’m so close.
Walking through the Champ de Mars, the park area just to SouthEast, I saw the familiar sight of the tower immediately. As I got closer and closer, the tower seemed to remain the same size; huge. Slowly, I made my way through the park and to the tower itself, which was teeming with tourists trying to ride the elevator to the top. They busily hurried up to wait in line for a spectacular aerial view of the city. As I had just been to Montemartre, I didn’t feel the need to fight with other travelers for a view that I had already seen, so I just kept walking. Underneath and past the tower, over the bridge is the Jardin du Trocadéro and the Place du Trocadéro, which was originally a concert hall in central Paris. Rebuilt in 1937, the new Place du Trocadéro has served many purposes from entertainment to housing national museums. Some of it’s most well known uses was the when Hitler was pictured there touring parts of the vanquished city in 1940, and in 1948 the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But more than that, it might be one of the best vantage points to see the Eiffel Tower. ”La Tour Eiffel at Sunset” captures the view from said angle.
