Versailles

On Sunday I took off for Versailles with a friend from the music department. Although we ended up spending almost as much time waiting that day (for the train, in the epic ticket line, while the restaurant fought with my credit card after dinner) as we spent actually exploring the chateau and gardens, it was worth it -- and we even saw the little Statue of Liberty in the Seine from the RER on the way back into Paris. [If you're reading this on Facebook, it looks lots better at http://arcboutant.blogspot.com , I promise.]

This place is HUGE.

Doesn't everyone want an organ in their room?

Craziness in the Hall of Mirrors.

We're in a mirror in the Hall of Mirrors.

Hello, gigantic gardens. They were playing Lully from the hedges.

Arc de Triomphe

Here it is, with leftover patriotic love for Bastille Day snapping in the brisk wind. The text is from Charles de Gaulle's radio address on June 16, 1940.

A jeweled room

Last Thursday the cathedrals class went to a concert in Sainte-Chapelle, a tiny Gothic chapel (well, relatively speaking) a few blocks up from Notre Dame. It's nestled right in the Palais de Justice complex -- in fact security is so tight you have to walk through a metal detector to get in, and you end up exiting through the Palais itself -- but once you're inside this little stained-glass paradise you forget about all the courts surrounding you. The chapel was constructed as a reliquary for the reliquary for the crown of thorns (Gothic architects liked nesting such symbols inside each other), exclusively for French royalty. The downstairs chapel is delightful and beautifully painted, albeit in the same nineteenth-century restoration effort that touched Notre Dame, but the upper chapel, which is where the crown of thorns resided, is the true jewel. In fact there is more stained glass than wall. Although we weren't there at a very bright time of day, we'll return for class before the course is over, I think.

Here are a few photos from the delicate, intricate Sainte-Chapelle. One shows the reliquary for the crown of thorns, which is now kept at Notre Dame instead and displayed for veneration there monthly.

Bastille Day and more N-D

Well, I have quite a backlog of photos and events -- since last Tuesday I've been to Bastille Day celebrations, Notre Dame with my class (which was followed by an epic amount of steak), the lovely delicate Sainte-Chapelle for a concert, the Champs-Elysées, and Versailles. Oh, yeah, and class. Here are a few shots of poor quality from Bastille Day, taken from an intersection full of excited kids and their families. They shot fireworks over, next to, and from the Eiffel Tower. I love the smell of pyrotechnics.

On Wednesday our class returned to Notre Dame for our official cathedral visit there. I missed most of it because I declined to climb the towers based on the recent incident in the National Cathedral in which I failed to remove my face from the cool limestone wall of the narrow walkway right under the rose window ("but look at the bosses in the arches of the nave!" "no thanks!"). Instead I wandered around in the park behind the cathedral, got a few morning shots, and sat for a while in one of the chapels, enjoying the brightness of the stained glass and the play of trees' shadows on that cool windy bright morning.

Famous art

YSS has been nice enough to give us (well, "give" us) student passes to the Louvre, and I decided to take mine for a spin yesterday. The place is HUGE but I made it through the majority of the first floor in all three wings. It'll have to be more than a week before I go back again -- famous art overload!

Here are several interesting details I saw. You've seen all the famous stuff already anyway. Please excuse the folks who occasionally wandered into my photos.

"OMG MY STATUE IS REAL"

You have no idea how many people were squashing me.





Why yes, this is the original Code of Hammurabi. I walked into a room and there it was!