Bastille Day's fireworks @ Eiffel Tower

A wonderful summer starts to be over and it's time for me to get back to my blog in France, as well. Let me finally tell you about the experience I had already 1,5 months ago before I flew to Finland. July 14th, Bastille Day - the French national day.

Last year I saw the big fireworks show of Eiffel only for afar from a street corner of my previous home and decided already that time that if I'll be in Paris in July 2019, I would go to see it properly. We got a taste of French national day show already in Gentilly, our current location a tiny bit outside Paris, on the 13th of July when I, H and his friends spent the evening together. Even though Gentilly is not a big city compared to its surrounding areas, the fireworks flew to the sky for 15 minutes. The show was quite nice (though the background music was hardly audible) but I completely forgot about that when I experienced the show on the next day in the middle of the capital.

We knew that the Champ de Mars park in front of Eiffel Tower would be more than full of people by evening so I and H went to reserve a place from there already hours before the actual show time. We arrived around 6 pm to the security check of the enclosure that included the whole Champ de Mars and noticed that it was difficult to find place for a picnic mat even at that time anymore. Luckily we found a small area next to a path that was enough for us who were still waiting for a few people to join us. Eventually others found other spots to enjoy the evening and I spent 4 hours with H playing games, eating our snacks and watching the park getting always fuller and fuller of human mass before the national day show started with a classical concert at 10 pm.

Champ de Mars around 6 pm.

Around the sun set time. The tower gets sparkles
for 5 minutes each exact hour.

The feeling during the concert was already quite memorable but the firework show was something indescribable! It was not only one of the biggest fireworks that I have seen but they also used music and the Eiffel Tower's shape in an awesome way! Waiting for hours among thousands of people was totally worth of the experience! If you ever happen to be in Paris on Bastille Day, it's my advise to use half a day for getting a nice spot to see that.

As from any huge happening, you can surely imagine what it was like to leave the place after the show finished around midnight. Or maybe you cannot even imagine. So lots of population to every direction across the width of the big roads... There was no hope of getting the closest metros nor city bikes so we walked a few kilometers to rerB train and luckily managed to catch the last train of the night.