Sorry about the delay in blogging once again. I promise that I will about all the days of my trip and probably a couple of days after so keep looking for those. This blog post is for day June 13, 2013.
This day started out early and was packed full of many many things. I started out by going to Le Panthéon in the Latin Quarter in Paris. I went in not having a clue what it was and was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it was a church. It was very large but by no means was it the largest nor the prettiest church that I had been in. It was very empty but with many statues along the walls. I assume that it is no longer a working church since there were no pews and no formal alter. The church would have been unremarkable in my eyes if they had not had a crypt.
The crypt itself was not impressive for it was not large nor richly decorated but it holds some very impressive people. Such people as Marie and Pierre Curie, Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The rooms were very cold and everybody was respectfully solemn. The end of the crypt was kinda weird as in it ended in a large room that had two picnic like tables in the middle and in alcoves there were TVs playing the televised procession of the interment of the Curie's. There were no guards and the place, although there were a fair about of people felt, empty and slightly abandoned.
After leaving Le Panthéon we went to a crepe place and I had the best crepe of my entire trip (and that's a lot of crepes)!
I then rushed across town and took a tour of the opera house since I was not able to get seats for the show the night before. It was beautiful and I wished that I was able to see a ballet preformed there but that didn't start until after we left. I loved walking around the place and seeing the ballet costumes they had around and being able to see all the places that if I had gone to a show I would not have seen like the front balcony and the ridiculously decorated reception hall. I hope that I haven't over used the word ridiculous too much in the blog but I really could describe everything in France as ridiculous either the decoration is that extravagant or the historical context is amazing or the price of things are spendy. C'est la vie!
I than took my chance and inadvertently wandered around Paris for a bit. I was trying to find La Madeleine but instead found La Place Vendome which I think is the spendy-ist place every. I wandered in to the square after I walked through the Tuileries Garden and the Place de la Concorde. La Place Vendome has Garland, Cartier and Tiffany's lining the street to it. In the place they had stores like Chanel next to Dior across the way from Rolex. I felt out of place and miss dressed to even look in the extravagant window displays. I eventually found La Madeleine which turned out to be a church (I had no idea). It had actually started to rain on my way up the street to the very Roman looking building and I ran inside seeking shelter and when I left the rain had stopped. Paris works in mysterious ways like that.
The class had its last seminar that day in the Montparnasse Cemetery. When I walked out of the metro I was assaulted by the Tour de Montparnasse which is a monstrosity of a building that stands alone and towers over the level Haussmann buildings. The only reason that I would go to the top of it is so that I don't have to see it when I look at Paris. That is the same reason that Parisians give when they talk about the Eiffel Tower (which they hate). The cemetery was eerie since it was still a cloudy rainy day. This cemetery had the same deal as the one the day before, as in if your family doesn't pay for you to stay where you are buried or if your tomb looks abandoned they will remove your body and bury you somewhere else that is less of prime real-estate. I realized walking through that the newer graves (and there were a lot) are because the person who was buried there before them were either neglected by their family (or didn't have any more family) they could not afford to have you interned there forever. It was a hard concept for me to take and I had to stop for a moment and collect myself. Those new graves are there because somebody else's "final" resting place was not theirs forever. They are buried where somebody else was once buried. This is a hard concept for me to understand, but the French and I am sure most of Europe understand and are fine with it.
After the cemetery which had the likes of Gertrude Stein and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi the designer of the Statue of Liberty among many others. I then went on a boat ride down the Seine at sunset. I was a wonderful way to cap off the day. We went down and back up in the open air part of the boat as a group and had so much fun. I could tell you all the things I saw but just think of every manor monument along the Seine that I have talked about and I saw it that night at dusk. A smaller group of us then hoped on the metro and went to go see the Eiffel Tower sparkle for one last time. It was a beautiful sight.
So the day was long and the night just as long but I loved every minute of it, even though we ended up waiting a half an hour for the train since we were out so late. It was totally worth it though.
Jusqu'à demain
Bisous Janice
Marie Curie's Tomb.
A ceiling in the Opera house.
Dior display case.
La Madeleine
The prettiest grave I have ever seen. It was a young person and
the figures on the top represent different scenes in life.
Sunset on the Seine.
The Eiffel Tower all prettied up.
No comments:
Post a Comment