Bummin' around Paris
Our next adventure in Paris was the Fat Tire Tours Segway Tour. Tori and I did this last year and Rebek couldn't wait to get to ride a segway. At first we all balked at having to wear helmets but if you don't wear a helmet then you can't ride their segways so we acquiesced. The segways we were assigned had just returned from the morning's tour and the handle bars were grimy with sweat and God knows what else so Bek and I whipped out the hand sanitizer and went to town. (Helmet straps come with extra chins!)
We rode all over the place, over bridges and through the woods...
On this bridge that crosses the Seine a custom has been started where couples go to the bridge and put a lock on the cables representing their love being "locked in". After they lock the lock they throw the key in to the river. Some of the locks are just plain little locks...
And other locks are a little fancier....
There was even one sad couple who put a combination lock on the bridge. I don't know if they missed the point of the whole exercise or if they just got caught in the moment and used the first lock they could find.
Our segway ride ended in the park in front of the Eiffel tower.
After our tour we posed for some pictures...
and then Rebek spotted these girls giving out "Free Hugs", (http://www.freehugscampaign.org/):
I got to hug the huggers ..
but Tori was too busy taking pictures so the huggers were gone by the time Tori was ready for her hug ...so Rebek hugged her instead.
For anyone who has never been to Paris I have to tell you that it is such a beautiful city. Everything is pretty. Everything is nice. They work really hard at keeping everything just so... So when you see something like this is was no wonder that everyone was staring at him:
This guy had obviously been having a really bad day...or a really good day...I really couldn't decide which. He was already blasted out of his mind drunk when we saw him stumble in to this seating area under the Eiffel Tower. He had a grocery sack with 3 very nice bottles of wine, and a brand new cork screw. In another bag he had a brand new boom box, a new CD, a brand new set of head phones and a package of batteries. It took him quite a while to rip the cork screw out of the packaging and then he just flung the package to the ground. After he got the wine bottle open he just started chugging from the bottle. When he had quenched his thirst he then tore in to the boom box, headphones and cd and again just flung his trash all over the place. He was talking and laughing to himself the whole time. We sat and watched this guy for quite some time..but then as the sun shifted he go too hot where he was sitting and changed seats. This change caused him to no longer be down wind from us. Whooo Betty! In less than 2 minutes the smell was so bad that we had to pick up and leave. As we were gathering our stuff to leave I'm happy to say that he made an attempt at cleaning up his mess. Sadly, when he bent over to pick up his trash he just about fell on his head so he decided to just kind of kick the trash to the side. I'm sure in his mind he thought it was cleaned up reeeeal niiiice.
I wonder if it's not against the law to drink alcohol in public in France? This guy was openly drinking wine out of the bottle and was obviously very, very drunk and the police didn't bother him at all. However...on the other side of this park we watched some heinous criminals being hauled away by the Eiffel Tower police. These criminals were selling fake Eiffel Tower trinkets and they were being led away in handcuffs. Apparently free enterprise is a much bigger crime than public drunkenness.
While speaking of crimes/vs/non-crimes....On this very same afternoon I saw not one but two different families not only allowing...but encouraging and aiding their older than toddler children to relieve their selves in the garden at the Eiffel Tower. I don't care if you are 6 months old or 6 years old...urinating or defecating in public is wrong and yet no one in the park seemed to be bothered by it other than me.
What is your opinion on this??
(Believe it or not I still have one more post about Paris and then I'm done!)
Labels: travel
posted by Tami Wyatt at 4:13 PM
8 Comments:
I'm sure that if you've been taught for a lifetime to urinate in public, it probably wouldn't bother you one bit. Since we're been taught privacy, ours is a whole different world. I remember a young mother of twins that was from Scotland...and she thought nothing at all of letting her little twins run around the house and the front yard naked...and yes, they would do their business wherever they were standing. That was they thing to do in her country.
But would they "go" in public gardens?
I found the sidewalks in Paris totally gross. Full of dog (maybe people) urine, poo and spit. Not off to the side, but bang in the middle of the walk. LARGE piles of poo with slip marks made by some hapless person who clearly didn't see it, pee puddles right down the center of the walk. It hadn't rained for sometime so the mess was particularly bad. The Parisians do love their dogs, but it goes way too far. You were there in August, when Parisians run away to the countryside, so maybe it wasn't as bad.
How fun! What an interesting time. Aren't the things you see in other cultures just captivating?
Yuk, bring doggie bags for "leftovers" and then toss em. That's just rude in any language to take a dump & leave it - by man or dog!! It must reek...
It's way legal to drink in public in most (probably all) of Europe. And I think you can start at 16 too. This is Aubree by the way. Love your stories Tami
WTF is up with all these ad postings? After reading this I wonder if a certain member of the Canfield family maybe thought she was European....seeing that this person went to the restroom where and whenever they felt and then tried to hide it.
These spam comments all showed up in a row and in my effort to delete them all at once I somehow managed to publish them instead. I have no idea how to delete already published comments so apparently they are now a permanent part of this posting.
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