Tromping the Champs

After following countless Sortie signs leading us down endless corridors lined with casino-style shopping outlets, we escaped the monumental confines of the Louvre and had a café brunch of eggs Florentine before heading into the Tuileries park…

…along with a stream of people half of whom, in my opinion, should have been in school.  Green metal chairs to sit in and gaze at one’s cellphone in the sunshine were hotly contested items of relaxation.  Everyone else was strolling on the compact dirt paths of the extensive grounds.  

We took in the Luxor Obelisk (3300 BC) at the Place de la Concorde (Vive la Revolution!) and then I prevailed upon Ella to head up the tree-lined Champs-Élysée  towards the Arc de Triomphe.

Ella was none too excited at the prospect of enduring  a thirty-minute walk slowly weaving at my hip-replacement pace through the invasion of tourists clogging the promenade-wide sidewalk, but she put on a brave face and guided me through the throng.  Somehow I had gotten it into my head that walking along the Champs under the majestic overarching trees would be like a scene out of a Goddard movie…sixty years ago when there was a spacious beauty to the avenue unthickened by traffic.  Now it was a battle to keep from being mauled by the milling horde, but we finally made it to the famous arch.

Not quite sure it was worth the march, but at least I got the feel of how it is at the Arc in actuality: loud with unceasing traffic, a hulking huge monument to a glorious past, sort of a tomb to a more stately form of transport.

Maybe it was the swirling noise, but I suddenly got seized with an impulse to take the nearest metro an opposite direction and visit the Pompidou Center.  We hadn’t planned on doing this at any time during our stay in Paris, but it was mid-afternoon with the sun still shining bright.  The image of the exposed neo-modern skeleton of the colorful Pompidou Center contrasted to the heavy gray Arc appealed to me at that moment.

Google maps said the metro entrance was two-hundred feet away.  We took some nearby steps that turned out to be an underground passageway to the Arc.  We turned around and crossed the busy thoroughfare.  No luck.  We turned back and recrossed.  A breakdancer who had attracted a crowd finished his routine.  The crowd dispersed.  An entrance to the metro appeared.

It was a relatively brief ride to the Center, but of course I hadn’t purchased tickets ahead of time and there was a long line that didn’t appear to be moving.  We abandoned the idea of exhausting our dwindling energy and sought out the Stravinsky fountain nearby that Ella had read about.  It was the highlight of the day.  Surrealist salvation!