Day 14: La Defense

On day 14 of our honeymoon we took the Metro to La Defense, an area of modern office buildings outside of the Paris city center.  The major attraction here is La Grande Arche de la Defense (click for more info), a gigantic hollowed-out cube office building built in 1989 to commemorate the French bicentennial.

As you can see here, the steps going up to the center of the building are a nice place to hang out:

There were a bunch of parallel glass walls in the area in the middle of the cube (Isako thinks it's put there as an artistic wind break so it won't be such a huge wind tunnel, but we couldn't find out for sure), so we took some creative pictures:

Isako says, "See, I'm not all that bad of a photographer either!"

Below you can see the structure through which the elevators to the observation deck ride.  The elevator itself looks like a clear capsule.  As usual, Isako probably had her eyes closed riding all the way up.

This is the view from the top of the stairs at the Arche:

Here's the view from the top of the Arche (I didn't take many pictures because it was so hazy).  On the right side, you see a miniature Las Vegas hotel-style tripod building, along with other strange-looking structures (yes, it's not a lens aberration.  The cylindrical building on the right does have a bottom portion sliced off...):

I took this picture when we were on the top floor of the Arche, this is peering through the windows to the elevator shaft, looking down at the hole that the elevator comes up through:

This is during the elevator ride back down to the ground:

This is the inside of an exhibition center near the Grande Arche:

This picture gives a good view of the truss structure used by the elevators to the observation deck:

Here's Isako... "I'm pooped!"

This building had a rather odd shape... Isako said that the door overhang reminds her of Starship Enterprise:

Below are a few pictures of a neat fountain in La Defense.  It's hard to capture in pictures, but the fountains would pulse in such a way that each jet would shoot a glob of water out, then turn off, and wait just long enough for the glob to rise a couple of feet in the air and start falling down, and then they'd shoot another glob that would collide with the first one and make a big splash.  (Sorry, it's hard to explain, you have to see it.)