Tora's European Adventures, Paris, Day Two
I head out to meet tattermuffin and her mother at their hotel, stopping along the way to grab a croissant for breakfast. I get to the street their hotel is on without problems, but turn the wrong way on the street, and walk several blocks before I realize my error. As I walked along, I was startled by the following sight:
That was when I realized what the song really means when it says, "You can check out, but you can never leave." I was able to leave the Hotel California in Andong, South Korea, so I thought I was home free. But it turns out that what it really means is that no matter where you go, there will be a Hotel California right there with you. You can check out, but you can't get away.
Eventually, I did make it to their hotel, albeit a little late. From there, we headed to Notre Dame. I know, you're thinking, "she put up pictures of Notre Dame yesterday, and she said they went in." But you see, in the early afternoon we merely walked by on the bank of the Seine, and in the afternoon, we hurried in for a specific errand. This time, we were there to climb the tower, and have a real look around the inside, including the Treasury. The tower didn't open until 10am, so we went inside first.
It's a lovely building, and it has beautiful stained glass windows. Here's one example:
And another:
Did you notice the greenmen? Here's a closeup:
Sorry, it's blurry, but taking pictures in the dark, while leaning backwards, with a really slow camera are not the best conditions for perfect pictures.
Here's the least blurry of the rose window pictures I took:
And here's a rose window from the outside:
10am rolled around, as it does, so we went out and stood in line for a bit, and then trekked up quite a number of stairs, into a...gift shop. After a few minutes, we went through a door on the other side, and up a lot more stairs, and came out onto the gallery of gargoyles[1]. I had no idea there were so many.
Someone had put a bouquet of flowers into the mouth of one of them.
tattermuffin with gargoyles:
This is a picture of the top corner of the tower we climbed up:
And this is a picture of the other tower:
And a gargoyle from above:
Note the "true" gargoyles in those three pictures, used for water drainage.
A picture back over the roof of Notre Dame:
Angel and Gargoyles:
Notre Dame's famous bell:
This is not a bad job of cropping; I was standing as far back as the space permitted, and I couldn't fit the whole bell in the frame. It's big.
Here's a detail of the tower's stonework, with a couple of gargoyle drain spouts:
After taking lots of pictures, we went around the other side of the bell tower (not the one we'd come up), and went up further.
Here's a picture of the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides from the top of Notre Dame. (Note, it was not easy to spot Notre Dame from the top of the Eiffel Tower, because the latter is so much taller, and Notre Dame rather blends in, unlike the Eiffel Tower.)
More of the view from the top of Notre Dame:
The building in the foreground flying the French flag is the Palace of Justice, and the spire behind it is St. Chapelle Cathedral. St. Chapelle is completely surrounded by the Palace of Justice and the Conciergerie, so I never got a full picture of the exterior.
This is St. Chapelle again, and behind and to the left of the spire you can see about half the Louvre. And the ferris wheel.
Here you see Sacre Coeur on the hill, and another cathedral (which I do not know the name of) on the left.
This is the top of one of the towers of Notre Dame.
This is a closeup of the statues adorning the base of the spire on Notre Dame.
After some time, and many pictures, we returned down the dizzying spiral stairs to the ground. tattermuffin counted, and it was exactly 365 stairs. I wish I'd taken a picture in the stairwell, but I was too busy trying to keep my footing on the very worn stairs.
Here's a few pictures taken from in front of Notre Dame.
Note the people lining up for mass.
The Tresury in Notre Dame still wasn't open, so then it was on to St. Chapelle.
To get into St. Chapelle, you have to wait in a long line and go through security, including a metal dector and x-ray of bags. This is not because they fear for St. Chapelle, but because the entrance to St. Chapelle is through the Palace of Justice, so you're going through their security. Eventually you get to the actual cathedral, and enter via the gift shop. From there, you go up a narrow winding staircase, and through a doorway. At that point, if you're like me, you stop and gape in astonishment at the overwhelmingly beautiful stained glass windows.
The windows are more than two stories high, and they fill three of the the walls, with only narrow columns between them. The fourth wall has a rose window. They have thoughtfully provided chairs along the two long walls, so you can sit while you crane your head back and admire. I'm not a Christian, and not familiar with most of the material in the bible, so most of the story the windows tell was lost on me, but the gorgeousness of the stained glass was more than enough. Pictures don't remotely do it justice, but here's a couple, anyway.
After gazing in raptures at the windows for some time, it was time for lunch, another grilled sandwich from a sidewalk stand. Then it was back to Notre Dame for the now open Treasury. The main thing I took away from the Treasury is that it's possible to make something look very, very, expensive (solid gold, covered in gems, etc.) and still be very, very ugly.
After that, it was on to the Cluny, a museum of the Middle Ages. While it had many beautiful things, the most memorable were the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. We stayed and admired them for some time.
Then it was time for dinner at a Turkish restaurant and resting tired our feet at their hotel room, before I headed back to my hotel and bed.
[1] Pedantic note: technically, most of these are actually grotesques. The word "gargoyle" originally meant a grotesque carving used as a water spout for drainage, and the name comes from the gurgling sound of running water. Notre Dame does, in fact, have many gargoyles of this type, if you look at the pictures carefully, but now "gargoyle" commonly refers to any grotesque, which is how I've used it here.