The mythical "they" say that Paris is a people-watching town, and they are right. I think that is partly due to the fact that there are lots of people to watch, and also because the rest of the people have nothing better to do; I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. A lot of the cafés have all of their chairs set up facing the street — to sit across the table from someone takes some doing. And people spend hours at the café, so they see a lot of people go by. Another place to watch people is at parks, museums, and Eiffel Towers. I went to the Eiffel Tower one evening, intending to go up it, but the lines were far too long and I ended up sitting at the base for thirty minutes or so until I had to leave to meet Justin and company for dinner. The Eiffel Tower is pretty fucking impressive, but there is only so much staring to be done at the thing, and there are only so many pictures to be taken. (Also, it's so damn big that it doesn't fit in my camera's field of view from fewer than a few blocks away.) So I spent most of my time watching other people stare at it and take pictures. A surprising percentage of people lie down on the ground, their girlfriend/wife standing above them, to try to fit everything in to one frame.
Later in the trip I stopped by the Arc de Triomphe, at Charles de Gaulle Étoile. The Arc is lined up perfectly with the Champs Élysée, which runs straight from la Place de la Concorde. The best view of it, thus, is from the middle of the road. Which is where people take pictures from. They wait for a red light, and then walk just halfway across the crosswalk. There they direct their friends to bunch just right (they've got to set up the tripod first) and take twenty pictures, because some won't come out. In the meantime, French drivers are whizzing past them in both directions. It's cute.
Also, can you tell that I'm a shitty photographer? I like it, actually — it's artsy blurriness, right? Yeah, no, I know.
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