We will always have Paris

As a young boy my parents used to send me to different places around the world. I think they always felt a little guilty that they were not around much during my childhood so they tried to make it up by sending me to different countries… ALONE!

Oh well... so by the time I was sixteen, I had gone to France (twice), Germany and Switzerland and who knows where else... No seriously... I never paid attention. I had also traveled to Maine to do some deep sea kayaking and New Mexico to hike 50 miles.

Well anyway...

Well the first time I ever traveled out of the country I was in Paris by myself. After a quick trip to the catacombs in Paris I decided that I was going to go to the Eiffel Tower. This trip would lead me to write a story about it years later.

As I was leaving the tomb I ran into some very nasty looking kids. Who for some reason or another wanted to mug me? Now I figured money was what they wanted but no. What they really wanted was… my jeans. That's right… They could have had the money I had in my pocket but seriously they wanted my Levi's. Can you believe that…

Finally after getting away from that bunch I make it up to that thing. What a lousy structure that was. Well after spending two hours on line I get to spend twelve minutes riding the elevator only to be told that the tower will be closing in 10 minutes. Well I sit down on a bench where I proceeded to fall asleep for FIFTEEN minutes.

That's right a 16 year old kid who does not know a word of French is now stuck at the top of the tower. Every elevator is closed, all the shops are closed and I am the ONLY person up there. Let me tell you, loneliness does not seem quite as cool when you are stuck hundreds of feet (meters. Sorry they use the metric system) in the air in some foreign country. The only thing that is open is the stairs. So there I go.. I start running down the stairs. One thousand feet down and I am running down the stairs… I used to smoke for gods sake. I am having a hard time breathing so to take my mind off things I start to think of interesting Eiffel Tower facts. Like the fact that it was built in 1889 (what is that in metric).

I just knew it... That thing was going to collapse. This thing was constructed for the World's Fair back in the Bronze Age and I am running down the stairs like they are stable.

When I finally reached the second level, boy, were those French guards pissed. You would think I did something wrong. Like it was my idea to spend the last twenty minutes going down the stairs... That was 450 feet and the least these guys could do was bring me a bottle of Perrier or something... Losers... If I was not such an outstanding citizen as I am now I probably would have said, "Hey, the Germans are coming."

Needless to say... the next time I went to Paris I just went to Notre Dame... and let me tell you about those Gargoyles...