Paris is always a dream, until it turns into a nightmare.
I was finally visiting my friend Camille, the French girl I had hosted three summers ago. We were staying at her sister’s apartment in Paris for the two-day trip we had planned to the famous city.
We spent the morning wandering through Le Marais, the afternoon sipping café au lait on the Seine, and by late afternoon, we ended up sprawled out on the Champ de Mars, right beneath her — La Tour Eiffel.
The sky was painted by fluffly white clouds. People lounged lazily on the grass. Champagne bottles popped as people day-drank sprawled out lazily on blankets. The atmosphere was calming, consisting of quiet chatters and the breeze blowing through the city.
You can almost feel the calm, right? Well… hold that thought.
“Let’s go up. I have never seen the city from that high before,” Camille suggested.
Despite being afraid of heights, I couldn’t say no.
We walked to the south pillar, bought our tickets, and stepped into the elevator. It buzzed and whirred as it ascended with its usual hypnotic glide.
(Not ours—but exactly what it felt like before disaster struck.)
Halfway between the second level and the summit… it stopped.
No ding. No announcement. Just dead silence.
A baby started crying behind us. I can not lie, I wanted to maybe start crying too. The air grew thick with nerves. I looked at Camille, who was calm but alert. A French voice crackled over the intercom:
“Nous avons une panne temporaire. Restez calme.”
(We are experiencing a temporary outage. Please stay calm.)
We were stuck. Inside the Eiffel Tower. Suspended midair. It could be hours before we get back on the ground.
To break the silence, someone pulled out their phone and played a soft jazz song. It replicated elevator music, and in some sense, that was humurous enough to distract me from looking down while being hundreds of feet away from safety.
After nearly 45 minutes, engineers manually reset the system and we slowly began to descend. Camille and I agreed to not even attempt to go back up. Instead, we returned to our spot on the grass, and bought a much needed bottle of wine.
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