This tight little cafe across the street from the Musée d'Orsay is just the right place to tell you report about our little trip to Paris. I’m sitting at a tiny, round table with room just for one chair. the table is pushed up against the window, giving me a glance out at the decorated facade of the museum. The building was actually built to be a train station, Gare d’Orsay, and was completed by the World Fair of 1900. Apparently the architects and city planners of the day didn’t do their homework to well. The grandiose station, built to accommodate trains serving southwestern France, was abandoned in 1939. The station’s platforms were too short to handle the long trains of the day. The building was basically abandoned and was supposed to be torn down. Emotional protests saved the place and in 1977 the city started converting it into a museum.

This little screw up comes as not surprise to me. The city already had six train stations. There are even two right next to each other over near the apartment we are staying at; Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est. That’s right - the north station and the east station, both within one city block of each other. Perhaps by naming them so they fooled some government officials into thinking they needed two separate stations.

Paris has always had lots of money to spend on buildings. Did you know that the Eiffel Tower, completed for the World Fair of 1889, was supposed to be disassembled after the event. Luckily they abandoned that plan.
The flight into Paris was one of the most impressive parts of the trip. Upon leaving Stuttgart I was eased to see that the fog enveloping the Danube and the Swabian Alp mountains had cleared. Taking off in the middle of dense fog didn’t seem like much fun to me. As we approached Paris I first thought it was only clouds covering the city in a cozy blanket. Landing on a cloudy night was no problem, cus the pilot would have good visibility after descending below the clouds.

The white, pillowy lay was strangely illuminated from below, something I’d never witnessed before. It looked like someone from below was pointing spotlights, colored in shades of red and orange, at the clouds. The plane circled around the diffuse spots, allowing us time to examine the unusual space. It began to feel like the illuminated clouds formed the ground and the stars in the black space the backdrop of a newly created, surreal stage. Slowly the plane descended and disappeared into the endless white. Lower and lower we went and the white failed to fade. Not until the runway was within just a few feet did I realize it was fog, thick white fog. The pilot had managed a blind landing. Thank goodness for radar technology.