There's No Place Like Place de la Concorde

There are a lot of great plazas in European cities, including Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona, Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, Plaza de Espana in Seville, Piazza Navona in Rome, Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Piazza San Marco in Venice, Plaza Mayor in Segovia.

(Editor: The Spanish aren't exactly creative in naming their plazas.  Writer:  It's a major issue.  Get it?  Writer: There's no reason to criticize their language which they're proud of.  And don't get foreign language speakers started on "to," "too," and "two.")

Place de la Concorde is the one of the great plazas.  It's a main crossroads in Paris, and has an amazing history.  It's one of the sites of where a guillotine beheaded many a Frenchman/woman.  

There's a plaque where the guillotine did its bloody job by the 3,300 year old obelisk brought to Paris from Luxor.  (Yes, that's a link to photos I took in at the Temple of Luxor in Egypt, not Las Vegas.) This Paris location is where King Louis XVI was beheaded.  To honor those who had been whacked, his brother, Charles X, had this brought by boat north down the Nile, across the Mediterranean, up the Atlantic coast, and up the Seine.  It took an amazing two years.

Also "made a foot shorter" here were a host of superstars from back in that day -- Marie-Antoinette, Georges Danton, and Robespierre, among others.  By the way, since Robespierre was a leader in the Reign of Terror, it's kind of funny he who killed by the guillotine died by the guillotine.  As John Madden once said on an NFL game I was watching, "Irony can be so ironic."  No doubt Madden was thinking of Robespierre when he said it.

Back to the obelisk -- it's not just 3,300 years old (give or take a few years) it's 72 feet high, 220 tons of red granite that's covered in hieroglyphs.

There's also two massive fountains, the Fontaines des Mers et des Fleuves.  Alas, they did not have water in them yet for the spring/summer when we were there.  I guess the Paris authorities were worried they would freeze in the lows of 45-48 temperatures whilst we were there.

The fountains are amazing, but it would be nice if they had the water they are supposed to.   The fountain of the Seas (Mers) pays homage to France's maritime trade and industry (now with exciting new tariffs!), the fountain of the Rivers (des Fleuves) notes the importance of the rivers to move crops.  There are also Tritons and Neriads holding tight to dolphins.

(Between Rome and Paris, we did not have much luck with fountains on our last two trips.)