The Eif - as my friends and I referred to the Eiffel Tower during a school trip to Paris - was our home (ok, we stayed in a hotel a block away from the Eiffel Tower, but really, the Eif and the lawn was our home). Though we loved all of Paris (particularly the Latin Quarter), nothing topped the Eif. The massive crowds that gather at the Eif were our ticket to easy people watching. I even witnessed a German couple agree to marry under the Eif - the guy proposed right under the Eiffel Tower and since people realized what he was doing, we all waited for the girl to answer and cheered when she said yes.
On one occasion, after a veeerrrry long shopping trip to the Galleries Lafayette, our tour guides and teachers let us pick our own visiting destinations for the rest of the afternoon. I was in an awful mood because the shopping trip had been too long, and I hadn't wanted to spend the day indoors since the weather was incredible. I wanted to go back to the Eif damn it! So two other friends and I pretended to be pissier than we really were and went back to the hotel with the group of girls who wanted to go sleep or something.
After dropping off all of our junk and freshening up, our group of three got permission to go walk around (we had 4 hours to kill before dinner) and because we couldn't be late (again) the Eif was perfect for our socializing needs. So off we went. We walked around for an hour, crossing and re-crossing the streets, walking one length of the lawn and then the other - we were having a blast taking pictures for people who asked us to, taking our own pics, I don't know, just living.
Well, on the way back from our street crossing excursion, I noticed a group of young guys all wearing the same uniform, walking behind us. After informing my two friends, we pretended to take a random picture, just so the guys would pass us and we could walk behind them to figure out where they were from. So we're walking along, and it wasn't long before one of the guys glanced at us and then did a double take (my friend and I noticed the double take, but we didn't know that our other friend had just waved to the guy, hence his double take).
Well that was enough for the guy to nudge his friends and have them all stop and look, and say hello. It turned out that they were soccer players from Portugal - and they were very friendly! I will say that the guy who went out of his way to walk with me and let his teammates know that he got me (I speak Spanish and Italian, so the Portuguese wasn't hard to comprehend) made me have my little "love" encounter in Paris; yes, it was so much so like a movie that I was passionately kissed under the Eif for a while.
Oh man, the memories... haha, our love lasted for maybe three hours because they had to board a bus to go train for their soccer tournament, and I had to go back to reality and tour France with the girls from my school and our teachers... but I did get wonderful pictures, a cell phone number (no I haven't called it, nor will I) a marriage proposal, a pretty damn good kiss, and just an experience of a lifetime under the Eiffel Tower.
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