Paris!

This is an overdue post, but I have a good reason for not getting around to it yet...I was actually (gasp!) doing schoolwork pretty much straight from the time I got back from France on Monday morning through Thursday night. We had two projects due that night, one for studio and one for urbanism. It's nice to have them both turned in and have a relatively work-free weekend ahead of me (or at least a chance to catch up on some non studio work--I have a marker drawing for watercolor and a few churches to visit and analyze for urbanism, but both of those should be pretty enjoyable, actually).

Anyway, my trip is more interesting to read about than my homework schedule...so, I left last Wednesday morning for Paris. It was actually more like the middle of the night, though, because I had to get to the train station in time to take the 4:30 bus to the airport for my 7:30 flight. For some reason traveling cheaply usually seems to involves lots of legs in the journey. All of that went smoothly and I landed in Paris and took yet another bus from that airport to the city. The drive was about an hour long, and if I didn't know better I'd have thought we were driving through the midwest--we even passed cornfields. The bus dropped us off right by a metro station, and I successfully navigated my way to THE Notre Dame cathedral, where I had arranged to meet my friend Julie. I also successfully bought a metro ticket from a machine that was in French, without knowing a word of French. I was proud of myself until I found out later that I COULD have just changed the language setting to English. Then I just felt silly for not realizing that. Ah well. I got to Notre Dame about an hour before Julie and I were meeting, but mass was starting right as I walked in, so I was unexpectedly able to hit up daily mass! (That's happened to me fairly frequently, actually, and I suspect that He Himself may have a hand in arranging that:-) ).


Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame! :-)

When Julie came, she took me to her favorite panini place (based on quality and on price) for lunch. Unfortunately, though, Wednesday turns out to be the day that she has class for about 12 hours (I'm only exaggerating slightly), so we couldn't hang out in the afternoon. She suggested that I go to the Louvre, though, which seemed like a good idea, especially because it was raining. I got in for free thanks to being a student residing in Europe, and spent all afternoon wandering around in the midst of amazing artwork. The Louvre is HUGE. Even with all the time I spent there, I still didn't see everything. But I did see some pretty cool stuff--including the Mona Lisa, of course...but to be honest it didn't seem that much different or better than Da Vinci's other pieces. I also saw a lot of things that I had learned about last year in Architectural History and seen lots of pictures of, so it was cool to see them in person. And I didn't remember that most of those things were in the Louvre, so every time I came across something that I recognized it was a cool little "Oh! I know what that is!" moment. Here's one of those such things:


Note the size of the doorway compared to the size of this guy.

By the time I left, it was getting dark. The glass pyramid thing at the entrance looked really awesome all lit up, so I have a fairly hilarious series of pictures of me attempting to take one of myself with the museum in the background. Here's one of the better ones:


By "better" I mean "better of me". It doesn't quite capture the stuff behind me, though, so here's a good one of that.


One of these days I'll master that self-photography thing...and have pictures like this AND with me in them.

After my mini photo shoot, I met up with Julie and our other friend Meghan who's also studying in Paris, and we went back to their dorm--I guess that's the best word for it. A bunch of university students live there, anyway, but in singles, and they each have their own bathroom, and there's a kitchen on every floor. So a pretty fancy dorm.

On Thursday, we were all able to spend the whole day seeing the sights of Paris together, because Meghan doesn't have class on Thursdays and Julie has one from 8-10am. Nice for them, and lucky for me too. We started at Sacre Coeur, an impressive looking church built high up on a hill. It's fairly recent, built around the beginning of the 20th century, I think. (In America, that would be a really old church...but here it's practically new). It's built in a classical style, and I liked it alot. It also has perpetual adoration in the main part of the church, which is pretty cool. Here's the view as you approach it:



From there we wandered around the neighborhood near the church, and got paninis again for lunch. We spent the afternoon walking around, too. Here's a picture of a random sign we saw:


It says "I was in Paris". Pretty accurate.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant with authentic French food. I had French onion soup with French bread, and steak and French fries (apparantly that's a common combination). It was pretty good, but I think I like Italian food better, to be honest. I also tried one of Julie's escargot, but didn't really like it. It was too much work to get it out of the shell in the first place, and too squishy. But I'm glad I tried it.

That week also happened to be fall break for the ND students studying in London, and another one of our friends from there was getting in to Paris Thursday night with a few other Londoners, so we went and met them by the Eiffel Tower after dinner. It's really pretty at night--all lit up, and it sparkles for 5 minutes on the hour every hour.


Walsh reunion in Paris! From left: me, Julie, Tina, and Meghan

The next day, Friday, Julie and Meghan both didn't have class, so they did the tourist thing with me again. We saw two main things: the Shrine of the Miraculous Medal where Mary appeared to St. Catherine Laboure, and we actually went up the Eiffel Tower. Both were awesome. Here's the shrine:


St. Catherine's incorrupt body is preserved to the left of the altar.

And here's a shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower!


This is the Seine river. I had to look up how to spell that, because like most French words, how it's written and how it's pronounced don't necessarily have a direct correlation.

After that, we got a quick dinner and went back to the Louvre, because Tina and her London friends hadn't been there yet. Before I knew it it was time to head to the train station for my overnight trip to Lourdes! Julie, Meghan, and Jim (another ND student in Paris) very kindly escorted me to the station to make sure I got there alright, and after killing time browsing the teeny English section in a few bookstores, I boarded the train!

I think I'm going to pull another "to be contined" on this one...so stay tuned for my weekend in Lourdes!