"I love gingers! Are you single?"

...said the sketchy man selling pictures by the Seine to me this afternoon. I laughed all the way to the RER stop.

This afternoon I planned to go to Sainte-Chapelle (which has huge walls of stained-glass windows in the upper chapel), but the line was two blocks long, the sky was black, and the wind was ominously gusty, so I chose to go somewhere closer to potential shelter. I wound up back at Notre Dame and was hoping to spend some contemplative time inside, but of course it was a zoo outside and promised to be a zoo inside as well, so I might just go back for vespers or a morning mass. Instead, I walked around behind the cathedral to a worn-looking but pretty little Seine-side park (with spectacular views of the upper choir, of course, complete with gargoyles and flying buttresses!). Here are a few photos (including some fading roses) of that excursion.

Eventually the sun did come back out, and I wandered back across the Pont Neuf, which had nice little benches from which to take photos like this one:

In other news, this is where I live now at Cité U. Below, part of my room:


And the Japanese House across the street:

The Swedish House (my home):

And the student-center-ish building:

Bonne soirée!

Paris looks just like you think it should

...except a little shabbier, in a way. I found the same was true in Italy last year. But it's an endearing sort of shabby. Today I learned how to use the metro and RER and made it to a class meeting at Ecole l'Etoile, a little school that teaches French to university students from elsewhere. They will be hosting our classes and coordinating our events. There were scraggly roses in window boxes. (By the way, the metro is nowhere near as glamorous as it looks in Amélie!)

After our meeting, the class tromped its way to Notre Dame for the weekly Sunday afternoon organ concert. Here are a few scenes from along the way. (Incidentally, it was very easy to tell when we entered the touristy part of town, and the transition was quite abrupt.

By the way, they have, and drivers obey, traffic laws in Paris. Sometimes they're even nicer about pedestrians than they are in New Haven. Plus, there are lots of crosswalks.

And suddenly, we came out into the open and ZOMG CATHEDRAL

Italy jaded me as far as big cathedrals are concerned, and even the National Cathedral back in Washington, which I visited with FTE a few weeks ago, is bigger than Notre Dame. Still, this is the real deal: medieval, built by hand, and still standing despite the physical stress and political turmoil of many centuries.

Inside, things are dark, but the lighting is better than in many old churches. There's a fair amount of natural light from all the windows too.




The organ concert failed to impress most of the class, which fell asleep. Granted, I don't love nineteenth-century organ works myself, and a space like Notre Dame is just too muddy for them. But it was fun, and the organist must have had some hearing loss afterward -- the console is right under the pipes!

So that's what Notre Dame looks like. Now you know.

Paris!

Je suis arrivée enfin! And to my great relief I DO remember how to speak French! Really, the language isn't that difficult, though: just take simple words and make them into fancier words by adding prefixes and suffixes. Word of the day, thanks to some ads in CDG on the way to the border (sorry I don't have a photo but if you google it you get great pictures of plows): déneigement, snow removal.

More (and hopefully photos) after my return from an expedition to locate the supermarché (supermarket).

Travel day is here...

...and oh yeah, I guess I have some reading to do for class (after all, this is about a class), so I will be enjoying books about monks and cathedrals in the airport. Hello, monks -- I've missed you. See you in Paris.

Arc-boutant

It means flying buttress. Now you know.