The Seine River

14/02/2023

Wooden sticks were used to record tax payments in Britain until 1826. In 1834, two cartloads of such sticks were burnt in a furnace in the London Parliament House. Besides destroying centuries of valuable data, it also caused a chimney fire that ended up burning down the whole Parliament.

14/02/2023

The 1902 Saint-Pierre Volcanic eruption killed all 35,000 people in the town except one man (Ludger Sylbaris) who survived because he was the worst prisoner on the island and therefore lived in a solitary confinement cell.

12/02/2023

The drink mix Tang wasn't created by or for NASA. It was introduced in 1957 but sold poorly until the U.S. space agency used it for John Glenn's 1962 Mercury mission. Tang was then marketed as what the astronauts drank, but Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin later said, "Tang sucks."

25/01/2023

On the left bank of the river Seine are concentrated museums and tourist sites, headed by the Eiffel Tower, on the right - business centers and government agencies. However, the division is conditional - on the right bank remain the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Bois de Boulogne and Montmartre, no less popular with visitors. The most convenient option, which allows you to think about the route yourself, is a trip on the river streetcar Bateau Bus, which goes along the river with 8 stops.

21/01/2023

21/01/2023

The banks of the Seine have traditionally been the focus of attention of French landscape painters, but a real boom in interest in the river began with the advent of impressionism. Édouard Manet and Gustave Caillebotte lived permanently in Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris, and the rest of the members of the Salon of the Les Misérables came to visit them and worked in the open air. An island on the River Seine west of Argenteuil, in Chatou, was called the Isle of the Impressionists. Here, in the restaurant "Maisons-Fournaise" and the chamber museum, the works of artists are kept, among them the "Breakfast of the Rowers" by Auguste Renoir.

19/01/2023

From Rouen to Paris on the winding Seine there are many islands, tidal phenomena persist for 35 km from the mouth. The Seine River is 776 km long and reaches an average depth of 9.5 m near Paris. Much of the basin - plains with flat sandy banks, under threat of flooding during the winter months, only in the southeast, closer to the source, on the Langres plateau in Burgundy, the height above sea level reaches 900 m. The floods of the Seine during the cold season have become a real scourge of coastal areas. To save Paris from floods, in the 19th century the city built high stone embankments and began to carefully monitor water levels.