The Eiffel Tower.

I've gotten through two posts without mentioning it, but let's face it, it's basically the elephant in the room. We'll call it E.T. for short (if abbreves are sweeping the naysh, they may as well be sweeping this one too). For how out-of-place it looks in Paris, it may as well be an extra-terrestrial. I pass by it whenever I get on the metro and I have to catch my breath every time. I know the French hate it, but you can't argue with its grandeur. That tower owns you, and it knows it.

Because E.T. works kind of like a magnet. Attempting to blend in with the French regulars on the metro, I try my hardest to ignore the 7300 tonnes of shining cultural controversy that pop by the window between the Passy and Bir-Hakeim metro stops, but I find my eyes gazing up at it in spite of myself. Today, I gave in. I hopped off the metro at my usual stop (Passy) and instead of taking a left before the pharmacy to get into my apartment building, I veered right and embarked on one of my first Parisian firsts: walking from home to the E.T.

At a brisk pace, of course, alone, and God forbid I whip out a map and effectively brand myself with the giant "T" that makes all wide-eyed tourists so easy to identify. In the end, it took around 7 minutes. That's right. It takes less time to walk to the Eiffel Tower than it does to walk from my house at Tufts to Davis. And I am proud to say I accomplished my mission while walking past more than one of the vendors that creach around the E.T. area (the kind that haunt the tourist hot spots and shove overpriced, plastic E.T. keychains in people's faces if they detect the slightest interest in the looming metal tower in their eyes) without any of them trying to sell me anything. And I only took out my camera once (okay, maybe twice) and snapped a picture so fast before thrusting it back into my coat pocket for fear of getting knowing, demeaning looks from passerby that it turned out blurry. And then I turned right around nonchalantly and walked back. But fear not, my little American friends, I still have 4 months to figure out how to take a good picture of the E.T. without being caught by the public. And we'd better go back to calling it the Eiffel Tower, because I just can't take E.T. seriously. Then again, I don't think anyone who even remotely identifies themselves as "French" can take it all that seriously either.