Kevin Huang | First Time Out of Taiwan, and the Reason Was a Person (Eiffel Tower, Paris)

I was a fourth-year university student and I had never left Taiwan. The first place I went was Paris, and the reason had nothing to do with Paris.

Dulce was six months into a year abroad on an exchange programme. That is a long time when you are twenty-two. So the trip that ended up covering France and Italy in early 2018 was not really a European tour with a person attached; it was going to see someone, with a continent around it. I have noticed since that this is how most first trips actually work, and that almost nobody describes them that way afterwards.

The Eiffel Tower is impossible to describe without repeating what everyone has already said, so I will note the thing nobody mentions: the scale does not read properly until you are underneath it, at the base, looking up through the ironwork. From across the Champ de Mars it looks like its own photograph. From directly below it stops being an image and becomes 7,300 tonnes of iron standing on four feet, and you can see every rivet.

Gustave Eiffel's company built it for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and it was supposed to come down after twenty years. It survived because it turned out to be useful as a radio transmitter — the most famous structure in France kept alive by an engineering afterthought. I like that story more now than I did standing under it.

This memory is the start of a longer one. Later that trip came Rome, Castel Sant'Angelo at night, and a bookshop that had a book I already owned. First trips do that: everything is a first, and you do not know yet which ones will matter.

I now build and run Metablox.co, a platform for anchoring memories to the places they happened. This is one of the places.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co