26. Things to do on A Quick Travel Trip to Paris - Day Two

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Johnny mac and traveled was back.
This is day two of my trip to

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Paris in February of twenty twenty,
right before the pandemic, my daughter and

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I headed off to Paris and had
probably the last vacation of the world ever

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had. Mine was not interrupted at
all. If you missed a last week's

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episode that was day one of my
trip, you want to listen to that

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one before we get to this one. So my plan for day two again

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Paris tourist one oh one Eiffel Tower
and the Louver. Locals might be like,

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what are you doing. Maybe somebody
from Paris comes to New York City

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and they're like, I went to
the Empire State Building and the Statue of

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Liberty, and I'm like, really, dude, So I get it.

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But again, if Paris dude came
to New York City and told me once

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to the Empire State Building and the
Statue of Liberty, I'd be like,

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Oh, that's awesome. We don't
actually do that, but I'm glad you

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had to get like I would get
it. So if you're from France and

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you want to make father of me, go ahead, so much like yesterday

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in my trip and last week in
this podcast. I took my familiar route

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up the Ciena River again. This
is below street level, so you can

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walk along the river uninterrupted. There
are lots of people jogging, like lots

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lots of people on bikes, lots, but it's really cool. Oh I'm

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remembering now. There are bridges that
cross the sand, like footbridges. There's

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one that has eight trillion padlocks.
It's a way that you show your love

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to your significant other. You get
a padlock and you chain it to the

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bridge, and I guess they never
take these things off. So it's a

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footbridge with a ton of padlocks.
That was kind of cool. So we

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made our way up to the Eiffel
Tower. Now, on the grounds surrounding

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the Eiffel Tower, there are what
I would call knuckleheads. They're selling trinkets.

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They're coming on a little too strong. It's not scary, you're not

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gonna be mugged, but it's like
a little too much. It's like,

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I don't want to key chain.
I just leave me alone, please.

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It's one of those things where I
had to go into New Yorker mode and

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just like I don't make eye contact
with you, and even if you speak

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to me, I pretend you didn't
exist. I had to do that in

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that area. So that's a little
annoying. You want to book an advance

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so you have an appointment at the
Eiffel Tower, so you're not in line.

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Hell, you know, you say
like nine thirty or something. I

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did mind early in the morning,
just to get the day started. And

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it's pretty cool. So we took
the elevator to the top. Now,

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the elevator going up was a little
scary, and here's why, because just

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picture what the Eiffel Tower looks like, and there's an elevator going up in

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the middle. By the time you
get pretty close to the top, you

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feel like you're in an elevator with
nothing around you. Like normally you're in

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an elevator and there's a building around
you, but this is you know,

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there were windows in the elevator,
so you're just looking out. And when

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you're closer to the ground, all
right, there's the architecture of the tower

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itself way over there. But by
the time you get the top, you

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just feel like, wow, we're
just kind of hanging out here. A

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little scary design and constructed for the
eighteen eighty nine Exposition Universe cell. The

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Eiffel Tower was always meant to be
a temporary structure. How's that going?

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But it has skirted demolition twice.
The first time, at the start of

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the nineteen hundreds, the tower was
kept around because of its transmission talents.

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They figured out they could do why
iireless transmissions from there, so it got

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to hang around. During World War
One, the Eiffel towers transmission capabilities enabled

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it to intercept communication from enemies,
so I got to stick. The second

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time it was almost destroyed was when
the Germans occupied France during World War Two.

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Hitler wanted to get rid of the
tower, but never got around to

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it. Can you imagine many Parisians
initially found the Eiffel Tower to be an

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eyesore se you'd take the elevator all
the way to the top, great panoramic

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views. I took so many pictures
when I was doing the prep for this

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series of pods, I saw it
took fifteen hundred pictures in Paris and Versailles.

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Remember days we'd travel with a camera
and you would have I don't know,

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a roll of film with twenty four
pictures, so you'd be like,

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all right, I guess I'll use
two of my twenty four on the Eiffel

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Tower and hope they come out now. It's just like click click, click,

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click click. I love digital photography. So we hung out at the

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top for quite some time. Again, you just take in the views.

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One thing I really like about Harris
reminds me of Washington, DC. Were

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more likely Washington inspired by Harris.
The Eiffel Tower is the center point.

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Everything is lower, so you're not
looking across the street at a skyscraper.

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Paris. They've done a really good
job with zoning. I'm a zoning snob.

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It looks great. They haven't let
people just build whatever the hell they

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want. Great job, Harris.
The views are absolutely amazing. And then

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my daughter and I we decided to
walk down because when am I going to

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be at the Eiffel Tower and when
am I going to walk down? So

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we walked down. There are stairs, there are other people doing it.

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Most people take the elevator down,
but it was kind of cool, not

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too hard, and it's just these
metal stairs, you know what a staircase

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looks like. So zig zag zig
zag all the way down and I'm really

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glad I did it. Back to
the bottom and then underneath the structure.

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There were some street vendor. Cart
vendors think they're more permanent like stands.

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I guess I found a place to
eat there. I got a hot dog.

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I had read that Paris has good
hot dogs. Paris doesn't have good

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hot dogs. I got a hot
dog from the cart vendor and a drink.

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Now was around midday. The grounds
behind the Eiffel Tower really cool and

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they caught my eyes. So I'm
like, oh, let's head this way,

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and I found myself walking around some
of the local neighborhoods. I couldn't

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really tell you where I was or
what I saw. I just know it

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was all gorgeous. And then we
made our way to the Louver. Hey,

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you know why I even heard of
the Louver because it's awesome. You

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know, you walk around one of
those things, It's like I was just

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bouncing around and like, doop doo, do doop doo. Oh, look

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it's the Venus de Milo. I
wasn't even looking for it. I was

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just walking down a hallway and suddenly
it's in front of my face and I'm

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like, ah, that's pretty cool. So there's a reason you've heard of

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it. With a teenager a teenage
girl. I easily spent five hours there.

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Now, if I had my son
with me, he would have been

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born in fifteen minutes. But like, can we go? But my daughter

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and I walked around five hours easily. I would go back right now and

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do another five hours. So much
to see. Again, it's the most

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famous museum for a reason, and
it is big. Get first, Open

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and seventeen ninety three features a grand
total of thirty five thousand works of art.

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You want Egyptian mummies, you got
it, Ancient Greek sculptures, you

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got it. Venus de Milo.
Yeah, the Mona Lisa, that's like

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its own thing. There's a bit
of a weight. You gotta do like

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disney Land style lines back and forth, and you get to the front and

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you can take a picture from not
that close, but you can get a

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picture of you with the Mona Lisa
in it. It's the Mona Lisa.

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You're gonna do it. Do it. Before it was a museum, the

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Louvers served as a royal residence for
a bunch of people, including Louis the

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fourteenth. Again, this thing is
huge. You can check out Napoleon the

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Third's apartment as big as this is. Louis the fourteenth bailed and went to

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Versai. I'll talk about Versai in
the next episode. That's when it started

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to become a museum. You are
definitely, definitely, definitely going to will

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make sure you have a ticket to
get in or you'll wind up in line.

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Hell, so buy a ticket with
a time stamp on it. This

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and the tower. You want to
plan the stay out. Like I said,

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I did both in one day,
one of them morning, one the

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afternoon. That works out just fine. One place I didn't get to see

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and I kept walking past it,
and I kept catching my eye along the

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left bank the Orse Museum. In
there are paintings by money Sazan van Go

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and I just I couldn't get there. I just didn't have any time left.

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One review says. Travelers say the
museum is much more manageable than the

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overwhelming Louver, and there was significantly
fewer crowds. I would recommend figure out

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a way to do both. If
I had to do over. I don't

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know. See this is the thing. I don't know where I would have

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found the three four hours to do
the museum, because as you've been listening,

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as you here next week, I
just didn't have any time left.

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Quick stop back at the hotel,
change, get refreshed, and then we

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headed out to the Latin Quarter again. I talked about that on the first

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Paris episode. Just picked a restaurant
on a corner somewhere. I had some

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nice chicken thing. I think my
daughter went conservative, probably had like a

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Hamburg or something. It was nice. You know, you sit there,

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you people watch, try and speak
to the waiter in French. He speaks

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to you in English. It's great. Then we walked around the doors in

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the Latin Quarter. There's a candy
shop. I tried to look it up

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so I could tell you more about
it. It's got a pirates in front

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of it. So if you're walking
through the Latin Quarter and you see a

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pirate in front of a candy store, that's where you want to go.

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They just have these big barrels of
candy and we just we just loaded up.

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It was so good. I went
in one of the stores and I

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bought myself a very nice gray PSG
soccer team cap that has gotten a lot

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of use. That was my go
to hat for all of twenty twenty and

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most of twenty twenty one. Love
that cap. Glad I bought it,

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and there a bunch of bookstores we
walked around. I almost bought a book

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in French for I don't know no
reason, got caught up in the moment

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and I was like, do you
need this? No, I also like

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to travel light. And then we
headed back to the hotel at two jam

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Pack days in Paris. And in
the next episode we're gonna go down to

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Versailles, which is differently awesome.
So you can follow this show on Apple

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podcast, Spotify or where do you
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