Paris, part 2...

Saturday in Paris, we started to hit some of the more touristy things. We started off the morning by heading to Notre Dame, but sadly, we didn’t get to go in. We then meandered off to Sainte-Chapelle, which has incredible stained glass windows (called vitraux in France). It’s actually not a cathedral or church, but a reliquary. Apparently, a while back, a French king named Louis thought he had the actual crown of thorns that Christ worn on the cross, so he built Sainte Chapelle to house them. The result is really amazing – over 1500 windows that tell the story of creation through the resurrection in minute detail. We couldn’t actually see all of it, since they’re in the middle of renovations (that continue until 2013). Being as old as they are, the windows have acquired quite a bit of dirt, but since they’re so old, it requires fancy cleaning instead of Windex. So they’re going window by window (13 giant panes in all) and using infrared light to see and remove the dirt. It’s really cool, because they’ve already cleaned a couple, so you can see the huge difference the cleaning has made.


After Sainte-Chapelle, we discovered the (not-so-much) wonder of French public bathrooms. This particular one was beside Notre Dame, and besides being disgusting, the cleaning lady yelled at me because I simply let her know that the stall I had been in was out of toilet paper. It’s probably a good thing that she couldn’t see where I’d managed to break the soap dispenser, right?

After being yelled at for being courteous, we headed over to a really touristy alley with lots of Greek sandwiches and creperies. Crepes are amazing here, especially when they fill them with Nutella. Mmm…I also saw the world’s biggest jar of Nutella. I wanted to steal it, but that would be wrong. And I would have had to carry it all over Paris for the rest of the day, and my bag was already heavy enough. We did, however, feed Ratatouille…or so we’d like to think, seeing as how there were mice under the floorboards of the creperie. Ick.

The afternoon was dedicated to the bateaux mouches (literally, the boat flies). They take you up and down the Seine so you can see the main sights of Paris. They’re super touristy, but it was fun nonetheless, even if it was freezing cold from the wind. When we were done, we wanted to go shopping at the Galleries Lafayette, but managed to go completely the wrong way and take the longest route humanly possible. The shopping was good, but really expensive and we all ended up just looking instead.

For dinner, we ended up finding this amazing restaurant just the next street over from our hotel. All of us were too tired to go more than a street or two over, but this was a real find. It was a basic French restaurant, kind of expensive (but Furman—aka our tuition—picked up the bill), and was really good. I had onion soup, lamp chops and stole some half-baked chocolate cake with caramel sauce from Charlotte. Yum.

Sunday, we had a really full day. We started at the Hotel de Ville, then headed to the Place des Vosges, all for architecture lessons. We ended up having lunch at a quintessentially French café, with an adorable (typical) French man as our waiter. I decided to go typical French and had a croque monsieur and a crème brulée for dessert. The sandwich was okay, but the crème brulée was wonderful. It’s funny -- I keep hitting home runs with food and don’t even mean to. Although it’s not particularly tough to do in France.

After lunch, we realized that we were about 100 feet from Victor Hugo’s house, so naturally we went to see it. We then trekked to the Sorbonne and lastly to the Louvre, all for more architecture. We all headed back to the hotel and about died, but rallied just enough to go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Talk about feeling inadequate. The entire staff spoke Chinese (obviously), French for Parisians, and English for tourists. And I’ve been so proud of speaking just French. I managed another home run with my sautéed chicken and grilled walnuts (the walnuts literally tasted like candy). Afterward, we all really wanted some crepes, but since this is France, nothing was open late, and we got lost anyways.

The next morning, we somehow managed to drag ourselves out of bed, went to get breakfast (hotel breakfast is so good here – croissant, brioche, and baguette), and took the train back to Versailles. Such was our visit to Paris.