Sunday, February 10, 2008

Night Services 4




Well, in reality this was taken on the afternoon of August 20, 1986 from inside Notre Dame, not the one with the Fighting Leprechaun but the one with the hunchback. Yes, the one in Paris, France. I took a three days bus tour of the city early in my second year in Germany and my final year in the Air Force. We also went to Versailles and the Louvre (pre-Pei's glass pyramid), I didn't go to the Eiffel Tower though, something I now regret. As I recall it was another ticket that this poor Airman just couldn't afford. That afternoon I walked around town, shared a beer with some locals in a park, ate some street food and got a kick watching the Algerian street venders scatter at he first sight of the Police. Regardless of what I did or didn't do in Paris I'm glad I went. In Paris, as in other European cities, it makes an American humble to the word old. One or two hundred years is nothing, buildings and cities that were three, four even five hundred years old were typical. But they lacked that wild unpredictable quality of us American. I don't know whether that's good or not.

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