France
what happened today in 1889?
It feels like a while since we have been on the blog… (a week to be exact) and it’s thanks to wifi at home being unavailable 😦 But we are up and running again! YAY!
To celebrate and mark the significance of TODAY: March 31 – we will be honouring the Eiffel Tower which officially opened 126 years ago (back in 1889).
And here are 5 random facts to go with our photos of the Eiffel Tower.
Did you know…
- It took 2 years to build the Eiffel Tower?
- The Eiffel Tower acted as a radio antennae in the early 1900s?
- It was originally described as a “monstrous eyesore”?
- The Eiffel Tower is covered in 60 tons of paint, which needs to be touched up every 7 years?
- It attracts almost 7 million visitors a year?
A beautiful Parisian icon or an eyesore?
Have you been and what did you think?
Leave us a comment.
Share this:
weekly photo challenge: rule of thirds
We are sharing a photo where our subject is off-centre – Mont St Michel in France at sunset in the lower third. The colours of the sky and of Mont St Michel itself makes for a movie mystery setting. If you would like to see more photos of Mont St Michel – we have a photo essay you can check out.
If you want to see more off-centre photos – see The Daily Post
Have a great weekend!
Please feel free to leave us any comments!
Share this:
weekly photo challenge: scale
We couldn’t go past this scene of a kitchen made to scale to share; the art of scale miniatures.
For more interpretations of scale, see The Daily Post.
For more scale miniatures scenes, see our post on the Museum of Miniatures and Cinema.
Have a fabulous weekend, everyone!
As always, we welcome your comments 🙂
Share this:
mont st michel: a photo essay
There are quite a number of places in the world that we have seen photos of and have therefore decided that we wanted to go there.
Mont St Michel is one of them. It has been on our dream travel list for as long as we can remember. Plus the added bonus that it was on the UNESCO Heritage list that we are trying to tick off slowly. We missed going to see it last time we were in France. We were not letting it slip away again this time.
It is certainly not the easiest place to get to (particularly if you don’t have a car) so we decided to stay two nights – which turned out to be a double “thumbs up” decision. It gave us plenty of time to explore and relax without feeling like we were rushed.
After travelling several hours from Paris on a train and then a bus, we finally arrived! In the distance, we could see the outline. The feeling we often get inside when we get to finally see something we have been SOOOOO looking forward to: a tingle in our stomach and the goosebumps of “we are really here!”
It’s as majestic and grand as we have seen it in the pictures. Without wanting to sound cliché, we will be cliche anyway by saying that it truly took our breath away.
Once we were inside the walls after crossing the bridge, it was like we were zapped back in time to the Middle Ages (except for maybe the hoards of tourists in modern clothes).
Crowded as it was, we looked past that and found the entire place so surreal to witness. Walking up all those old stone steps to the top before exploring the inside. And the inside? It seems to carry that little bit of mystery, intrigue and plenty of history that we love when we explore places like this.
With the tide being out, we were able to walk around the outside of the walls on the mudflats. We didn’t stray too far as we were warned that there are sections of “quicksand”. It is recommended that you join a tour group before venturing too far.
To finish off our time there, we sat down for a local Normandy feed. We tried a soufflé omelette with bacon… let’s just say, it must be an acquired taste!
The other local dish we tried was creamy chicken cooked Normandy style and that was DELICIOUS 🙂
Mont St Michel was listed as a
UNESCO Heritage site in 1979.
To see the other UNESCO sites we have visited,
visit our unofficial bucket list
Have you been to Mont St Michel? Tell us your experiences/thoughts.
wise monkeys abroad 