Pleasantly Paris

Hello All!

The Louvre

Just like that, London came and went, and we found ourselves in the heart of Paris!  That's right: the city of love, the city of great art (though the Tate in London is the most visited art gallery in the world), and lots of croissants.  By the end, I think there were croissants coming out of my ears ... between those and baguettes, I don't know how anyone has room for a balanced diet in France.

Of course, there were many baffling things about Paris, but that is likely because I don't speak more than 10 words of French.  I took Spanish, comprende?  But, because we hit many of the tourist spots, our English-only, American-ness didn't seem to slow us down.  Surprisingly, though, the Louvre only had plaques in French.  Fortunately, words are seldom necessary to explicate the beauty of art.  I had no idea just how large the Louvre really was, and the museum is only a small part of the entire complex (do you see how far the wing extends down on the right side of the picture?!).  

The Thinker, Rodin

But, my favorite art galleries were the Musée D'orsay and the Musée Rodin.  The Musée D'orsay is housed in a former grand train station.  The interior is huge and also very pretty.  The museum itself houses more contemporary works, most notably from Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Rodin, just to name a few.  It has a great collection of sculpture, one of my favorite mediums.  In fact, you may recall from my Edinburgh posts that I am a huge Rodin fan and actually got to see his marble "The Kiss" sculpture in  Scotland.  The Musée Rodin in Paris was really fantastic, and easily my favorite place in this city!  It's a bold statement, but his works are truly amazing to circumnavigate.  Ben made the observation that many of Rodin's works play around with perspective - that some sculptures look strange when they are on the ground level.  "The Thinker," for example, looks like a proportionate man atop his high pedestal, but if he were lowered to the ground, some of his features would look comically large or small.  The museum is inside an old house/hotel, but Rodin's sculptures are also spread across a well-groomed garden.  For those of you who have seen the movie Midnight in Paris, the scene in front of Rodin's "The Thinker" takes place in these very gardens.

Sainte-Chapelle

In a close second for my favorite Parisian sites is the Sainte-Chapelle.  It was built in the 13th century for King Louis IX, and is a must-see because of its incredibly detailed architecture and HUGE stained glass windows - there is more window than wall!  I will let my pictures speak for themselves.  Because the Sainte-Chapelle is by the court buildings, we had to pass through metal detectors.  Ben was the last to pass through, and when he got to the other side, the security officer took one look at him and exclaimed, "trés classique!" (very classy!).  The culprit: the bowler!  I was beginning to think that that hat was the best and worst investment made to date.  So far we were 2 for 2 cities in which complete strangers gaped and loudly expounded about how fantastic Ben looked in that bowler.

Interior of Notre Dame

Just around the corner from the Sainte-Chapelle is famous Notre Dame, literally "Our Lady."  Notre Dame is located on an island in the middle of the Siene River (pronounced Sen), called the Île de la Cité.  My first thought was, wow, this isn't as large as I anticipated, but in reality Notre Dame is more massive than it first appears.  Construction began somewhere around the mid-12th century and was completed in 1345, which is why you can see both Gothic and Romanesque styles of architecture.  Since most of my excursions during the semester were within the UK, I did not encounter a lot of Catholic churches and cathedrals, but France is as Catholic are you're going to get .... other than Rome, of course (a Rome post is coming soon, I promise!).  In my opinion, the coolest history of any cathedral lies in the story of its bells.  When France was fighting its many wars, bells were often stolen from parish churches all over the countryside in order to be melted down and repurposed as cannon or musket balls.  As a result, some of the bells of Notre Dame were hidden away, though I'm not sure why because I suspect it would be quite difficult to steal a bell from a huge cathedral like Notre Dame.  The originals were replaced with cheaper copies.  In any case, either because they weren't stored properly or because they got damaged, the bells were not exactly in tune with one another when they were reinstalled.  In 2012, the plan was to simply recast the original bells - melt them down and, using that same metal, make "new" bells.  Unfortunately, they are still sitting in some storage facility awaiting a final decision.  Just a few months ago, 9 brand new bells were cast and rehung in the north tower.  The last fun fact about the bells of Notre Dame is this: when they were rung manually (pull the string ... ding dong), the vibrations would ripple through the whole building and occassionally cause structural damage.  When this happened, the bells were rung in groups at different assigned times.  The largest bell, for example, is rung by itself on the hour and zero seconds, and the smaller bells would follow.  Today, the bells are struck by hammers and controlled electronically.

Lock Bridge and  Notre Dame, Île de la Cité

A bit further down the Île de la Cité is a memorial to the deported Jews of France during WWII, which was really nice to see, especially since it sits right next to Notre Dame ... a redeeming quality of the French, I suppose.  Just by that is one of Paris's two "lock bridges."  It is tradition for couples to attach a lock to the fencing of the bridge and to throw the keys in the Siene, symbolizing endouring love.  Just think of how many keys must be down there!  The lock bridge we often see in the movies is further up the Siene, closer the to the Louvre, but Ben and I liked the one next to the memorial for the deported Jews.  We did not have a sharpie to mark our locks, but it'll be fun to try and find them when we return to Paris! (Our locks: find the red ribbon, look to the left at the medium-sized lock just above the white ribbon ... just above that medium-sized lock are two very small locks - those are ours).

The "other" Lock Bridge, overlooking the Île de la Cité

There is so much more to say about Paris, we were there for an entire week, after all!  I hope you enjoyed this first taste, and hopefully another post will appear in the next day or so.  And if you are inspired to do so, please leave a comment below.  Thanks for reading!