In which my photos are disappointingly grainy

(Written 20 September, 2008)

Last weekend we decided to go see Notre Dame, since we’d accidentally found it the night before. To get to Notre Dame on the metro, you get off at Cité, and immediately in front of that stop is a market. Monday through Saturday, this is a plant/garden market, but on Sundays, it becomes a pet market. Apparently once upon a time it was exclusively birds, but that’s no longer true.


I wanted to buy a black chicken and perform Satanic rituals, but the others wouldn’t let me.


Rows and rows of birdcages…


…and a close-up.


They’re so colorful, aren’t they? I love birds. This once got me a pet canary, who was supposed to be male, since the males sing more, but who then laid an egg. Clearly, not male.


These were labeled “tamed squirrels”. These are chipmunks. Crazy, crazy pet chipmunks. They could not stand still. They ran round and round the cage, upside down, leaping across and across and up and down. Chipmunks are not meant to be caged.


Bunnies! (Sideways, bizarrely.) Everyone loved these. They’d stop and watch for long periods of time, because bunnies (and guinea pigs) are cute and fuzzy.


This little guinea pig sat in his little house and didn’t move for the whole time we were watching.


This guy, on the other hand, kept looking up and hopping about. So cute.


Freebird! (I’m surprised none of these flew off. They must have clipped wings.) There was a teenager walking around with a parrot on his shoulder, and I really wanted a picture of him, but I thought that might have been awkward. I’m going to have to go back and get a rubber baguette dog toy, so I’ll see if he’s there again.

After the market, we headed over to Notre Dame.


Voila!


The rose window, close up. (See the row of statues beneath it? Those are all saints. But during the Revolution, people thought they were the old kings of France, and so they knocked off all the heads. A schoolteacher came along, found all the stone heads lying on the ground, gathered them up, and buried them in his backyard. Years and years and years later, the ground was dug up for something else, the heads were found, and the statues were restored.)


The three entrances and the whole row of saints.



Here’s the side of the church where you wait to ascend to the tower. It was in the shade, so it was really cold (for some reason, it already feels like late fall here. So cold, all the time, especially before noon), and there are all these shops with absurd prices just across the street.


Check out these steps. They’re so worn down, you can actually see the hollows from billions of footsteps. This doesn't happen in the US. Our buildings aren't old enough.


The view from the first level. No matter where you are in Paris, you can always see the Eiffel Tower from about 5 floors up (no buildings are allowed to be taller than the Arc de Triomphe, so it was a huge thing when the first skyscrapers (still shorter than the Eiffel Tower) went up in the 80s), and at night, you always know where it is because of the searchlight sweeping the sky.


The most-photographed gargoyle in the world, the one overlooking Paris. It’s also right at the top of the stairs; that might help. (I hate that my photos came out grainy instead of brilliant. My camera was on the wrong setting and I didn’t realize it. Anyone know how to fix that, short of going back and paying another 5E to go back up?)



The view in the other direction: the roof of the church itself.


I was incredibly glad that I haven’t seen the Doctor Who episode “Blink” while I was here. In it, the stone angels attack when your eyes are closed or you aren’t looking. As long as you can see them, they don’t move, but as soon as you have to blink, they move. They come closer and closer each time you blink, until they kill you. The 3 minutes of it I’ve seen terrified me, so I’m glad I haven’t watched the whole thing. Especially here. (Also, check out the bird gargoyle in the back. I love that one.)


A gargoyle actually eating something. It appears to be a dog or a horse. I love that someone actually carved that. (It may have been done in the 19th century by the stonemason restoring the tower, who decided that he didn’t like all the empty spaces left by ruined gargoyles and so he carved new ones.)


The bottom of the famous Notre Dame bell. This was as much of it as I could get: it’s HUGE, and you can’t back up very far. And now I need to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame again.


I have so many photos of gargoyles, it’s ridiculous. But I love gargoyles.


These are such cool cars. I keep seeing them all over the city (along with SmartCars, of which there appear to be millions, a practical decision in a city where the average parking space along the curb is about 6 feet long), and I loved this row.


This is such a white city: all the buildings, all the roofs, all white. I was expecting a lot of red/orange, from the fact that every single roof in Portugal is red tile, but I guess that’s more Mediterranean than Paris is. (Added to say: the south of France DOES have a lot of those style roofs. Coming soon: Biarritz!)

Next we went inside:


I think this is my favorite photo from Notre Dame. The graininess actually works in its favor, and I love the gradations of light and dark.


One of the stained glass windows. Aren’t they gorgeous?


Another stained glass window, one of the rose windows on the side. I love that they’ve got this theme going: rose window over row of saints.


The main part of the church, as seen from the front and to the side. Clearly. I love the colors here.


I love this obsession we have with miniaturization. Every time you go into a famous building, there’s always a model of it somewhere inside, as if seeing it in real life weren’t enough. You can’t really understand the whole of it, no, but the scale is so much greater.


The slaughter of the infants: the part of the Christmas Story that doesn’t get told so much. I had to explain it to one of the boys in the program. “Why are they killing the babies?” he asked. “And why is it in a church?” Because Jesus wasn’t killed, and so we have Christianity.


The altar. I like the strange man's face in the corner. I wonder if he knows he's actually looking RIGHT INTO the lens.


This statue of Mary is known as the Vierge des Etudiants. Being etudiants ourselves, we lit a votive candle, in the hopes that she’ll at least help us learn French. Here it is:



And, on the way out, here’s the main hall of the church.


The guy holding his head in his hands is the patron saint of Paris, St. Denis. He was the bishop of Paris in 250 AD, when he was beheaded on Montmartre, picked up his head, and walked two miles, preaching all the way. So, you know, saint.


Notre Dame from the garden in the back, where lots of people come just to sit.


And the fountain in said garden. From the angle I took this photo, it looks like one of the angels is picking his nose. I suspect he's supposed to be preaching, and I suspect I'm going to hell for this, but I thought it was funny. Here, I’ll show you:




I like this shot a lot. By this point, the sky had warmed into this great shade of blue, and I love the contrast with the white stone of the building. I took a lot of photos of that contrast, like this one:


After Notre Dame, we went looking for the famous gelato called Berthillon. It was absolutely delicious. The strawberry tastes like strawberries! The raspberry tastes like raspberries! The snozzberry tastes like snozzberries! The extra-bitter chocolate is probably the best. Get it with strawberry. FANTASTIC.

Also, we saw lots of mimes. Well, two. One almost ran into us in the street, spawning the fantastic quote, “Watch out for the mime!” We also saw this one in a falafel shop. I wonder how he ordered.


This here’s the Fontaine St-Michel:
















We’ve heard a fair amount of street musicians here, and most of them sing in English. We heard a badly-accented version of “Losing My Religion” on the metro, and I had to give the guy a coin because I laughed when I realized what he was singing, and I think he thought I was laughing at him. We also walked into a famous French bar to hear a very good version of “Highway to Hell,” interspersed with shouts to the crowd in French.

It’s a lot of fun just to wander the streets of Paris. We did that again today, and found a delicious Chinese restaurant and the 10th Annual Techno Parade, but that’s another story.

In which my photos are disappointingly blurred

Sorry this has been so long in coming; I just got swamped with picking classes/looking for an apartment/everyday stuff. (I finally found an apartment! Right next to the Centre Pompidou (the modern art museum – more on that later), with a French family who have two little kids, gorgeous spacious apartment. And free Internet! Whoo!)

But here goes.

First off: I went to look at an apartment last week right by the Arc de Triomphe. (This was actually the reason my housing was so screwed up: I thought I had this one, but it fell through, so I was left with nothing.) While we were over there, we decided why not actually go see it? We didn’t have time to go up, but here are some pictures from the ground:

The bottom…


…and the top.


There was some kind of memorial service going on at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I think. At least, it was gated off, full of dressed-up people, and lined with soldiers.


One of the carvings on the Arc.


And another. I like how even the carvings of Athena on a war memorial include a child reading at her foot: war, wisdom, and weaving. She’s my favorite goddess.

And that’s the Arc de Triomphe. I do want to go back another time and see the top, and I’ll definitely visit the Champs Elysees, because how could I not?

But here’s the Musee d’Orsay, where we were taken on an orientation field trip by Brown-in-Paris, known for having all the Impressionist artists. The museum is in a former railroad station, and you can still see the basic structure of that. But because it’s built in that tunnel sort of shape, they’ve been able to organize the art in a very cool layout: all the traditionalists are on one side, and the rule-breakers (like the Impressionists) are on the other.


Here’s one of the massive animal statues on the terrace. It’s a rhino (clearly), standing over what I can only say must be a cactus. I don’t know why. It must have some sort of symbolism. (And over to the left, that’s Megan, who always has a plan for sightseeing. She’s on the phone, confirming her apartment, after having been here for two days. Lucky.)


You can kind of get some sense of the railroad-station construction here. In front of the camera are a couple of girls in the program; they’re all wearing headsets because that’s how tours work at this museum. The tour guide has a microphone, and everyone in the tour has headsets to hear better. It was very helpful sometimes, especially since the tour was in French.


I told you my photos were blurred. There’s no flash photography allowed, so the pictures all came out blurred and washed out, which I found disappointing. But this clock is massive, a former railway clock.


Our guide, who was clearly enamored of rule-breakers, kept talking about how the old-style artists were so careful in their painting and only painted idealized subjects, not including the flaws in the real thing. She was going on about how no one has skin this color (“like marzipan”) in real life. Ok, granted, my skin will never be this perfect (I’ve got the lines and spots you’ll see on everyone, plus the faded freckles permanently burned into my shoulders, and more), but I do think it’s pretty much this color. It’s really awkward and reflective in real life, though, not so soft and elegant.


Apparently, they had frat parties in ancient Greece, too.


I snapped this picture running behind my tour, because I was caught by it. We didn’t really talk about any of the sculpture, but I really like this one: the facial expressions, the graceful movement of the figures. The man in the center (Bacchus, perhaps?) reminds me extraordinarily of Tilda Swinton.


I loved that this woman had set up an easel and was copying a Monet, and no one cared. I just thought that was really cool.


Ahh, this painting. My favorite Monet, partly because it reminds me of this bridge in Somesville, Maine, right down the street from my cousins’ house. But I also love the colors and the tranquility of it.

But then there’s Van Gogh, who is my favorite painter. I love the vibrant colors he uses and the fact that he exaggerates paint strokes and the way he never paints straight lines. Here are a few of my favorites. (I am extraordinarily disappointed, though, that Starry Night was probably in transit from New Haven, so I didn’t get to see it here and didn’t get to see it there because the tickets sold out. That’s my favorite painting ever; I have a poster of it which gets hung up in my dorm every year. It’s simultaneously calming and unnerving, and I love that he could do that with blue and green and yellow. Painting is all about colors for me, and nothing else affects me.)

Not Van Gogh, but:

Impressionism is not kind to faces.


Toulouse-Lautrec! The famous painter of the Moulin Rouge! I got really excited when I recognized this. It’s weird to see these up close: they’re huge, and it looks like they’re painted on the back of something else, newspaper maybe, or that tea-staining you do to make paper look old in middle school history projects. It’s like something is bleeding through. But I liked it.


I like sculpture better than paintings, and this one is epic. You can get such movement and violence in things like this, such fear.


Accidental flash! Oops. But the colors and the detail come out so much better here, even if the bright spot is kind of frustrating, don’t they? I wish flash photography didn’t harm paintings. (At least, so I’ve been told.)


Speaking of epic: the gates of hell. There’s so much detail in this, all the little figures fighting and falling. And two strangers for scale! (Actually, they were just standing there a long time and I got impatient. I’m probably going to be in lots of tourist photos by the time I leave here, with all the places I’ve been going to see.)


I love this: the symmetry, the grace, the phony background of stars. I love it all.


Another accidental flash. But this woman really struck me: I love the expression on her face. She looks like she knows more about you than you will ever know about yourself, and like that knowledge amuses her. I’ve never seen that in the Mona Lisa, but I like this one.


Polar bear! This cracked me up when I saw it. I don’t know why they have it or why someone carved it, but I love it. I like how there are almost no lines in the statue, but he still has a distinct expression on his face.

Whoo, epic post! I can't figure out how to cut pictures behind a handy little link so the page isn't so big, so I'm sorry about that, and if anyone knows how to fix it, please tell me. Up next: Notre Dame!