CITY OF LIGHT...

City of Light....

Can you guess which city is called as the city of Light? 

The answer is Paris..... 🗼 

Paris is such a famous city that every knows everything about it, right? Well, you might be surprised. Being such an ancient and important city, which has been at the heart of European history for centuries.. 

    Paris, the capital of France is built to the northern side of the country, on the river Seine. With a population of over 12 million, Paris is the world's 28th largest mega city. The area is 105 square kilometres (41 square miles), and around 2.15 million people live there. 

    Paris is called the city of love because each year millions of people come here to spend some romantic time, find the perfect setting for that, then go home delighted and spread the word. Paris is a strong brand because it keeps delivering its love promise.

    The city is named after Parisii tribe that inhabited the region from the mid-third century BC. The Parisii traded with numerous river towns. The Romans conquered the Paris basin in 52 BC and built a city known as ''Lutetia Parisiorum'' or Lutetia is short.

    

The concentration of architecture, culture, cafes, food, wine, art, rich history, all in one city. No other place on earth has raised and refined these qualities to the level Paris has.

Paris is famous for its cafe culture, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Moulin Rouge, pastries, and fashion. Paris is often seen as having beauty, elegance, and as being a boldly romantic city.

OK.. Most of us admired to the Effile tower 🗼....

Well, I am going to tell you what you might already know anyway. In 1889 French Government organized The Grand World Fair to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution (1789). As you know, first impression counts, so the organizers had to put their best foot forward — they decided to build something interesting and worthy of the event.

They had only five years to finish the project: from blue prints to a finished tower. So it's only fair that French were not able build something as colossal as the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, which took twenty years of construction. 

Open competition for the project received 107 proposals (with a lot of unusual ideas, such as a giant guillotine, for example). The choice was made in favor of the design presented by an engineer Gustave Eiffel and his associates. 

The construction took two years, two months, and five days; it mobilized 300 workers. They were able to meet a short construction deadline thanks to the high quality drawings with exact dimensions of more than 18,000 metal parts, made of 2.5 million rivets. None of the beams weighed more than 3 tons, which made it easy to lift metal parts up to certain spots.

Today, the Eiffel Tower in Paris is a 300 meters tall (324 meters with antennas) structure weighing approximately 10,100 tons. It has been the highest building in the world for over 40 years — almost 2 times higher than the tallest buildings of it's time: the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt (146.6 meters), Cologne Cathedral (156 meters), and Ulm Cathedral (161 meters) in Germany. It was until 1930 when the Chrysler Building, one of New York sights, surpassed the Paris landmark.

The Eiffel Tower is so unique that even its color, resembling the natural shade of bronze, is officially patented as "brown-Eiffel." And it's so famous that its small replicas can be found in Las Vegas (USA), Guangzhou and Shenzhen (China), Slobozia (Romania), Copenhagen (Denmark), Varna (Bulgaria), Aktau (Kazackstan) and other cities. Nowadays it belongs to people (not just people of France, but of entire world), and its images and representations are in public domain (which means that current owner of the Eiffel Tower, the city of Paris, doesn't receive profit from sales of millions of postcards, T-shirts, and other souvenirs). However, a special light show on the tower is copyrighted, and so commercial use of "Iron Lady" images is allowed only with the written permission of its service company, SETE.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris is the most famous monument of the city, of the country, and, perhaps, of entire world. However, big fame has played a cruel joke on the tower: according to surveys, tourists consider it the most disappointing tourist attraction in the world. 

It ll be the great opportunity to be impressed by the Eiffel Tower, to enjoy its beauty without a fuss, and to see panoramic views of Paris!