Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Our last night in Paris

Quantum, physics, Charlene Brown
(click on image to enlarge)

La Défense
Watercolour and crayon
©2013 Charlene Brown

On the last night of our Road Scholar Intergenerational Program in Paris, we went to the top of the Arc de Triomphe to watch the Eiffel Tower sparkling, and I made a video of the show… on purpose, unlike most of the videos I make with my digital camera. 
Turns out I’m not the first person to think of this – Google ‘Eiffel Tower sparkling Youtube’ and you will find almost 200,000 entries.  Mine turned out reasonably well, but I think it’s safe to say most of the versions on Youtube are better. So, if you want to see what it’s all about, please look there.
Then I decided to take advantage of our unique position to take some regular pictures in various other directions, including the view I’ve painted here, looking up the Ave de la Grande Armée and Ave Charles de Gaulle to La Défense. 
Begun in 1958, La Défense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district, featuring many skyscrapers and La Grande Arche, a twentieth century version of the Arc de Triomphe (and at 110 metres, twice as high as the original).  It has been suggested that La Grande Arche could be a hypercube, or tesseract, projected on a 3-dimensional world, such as I talked about in my July 24 blog post… but I decided not to get my mind in a knot trying to think that through again!