Another rather full day, but for that fact I am always glad, so long as what it was full of was good. Anyway, to begin we woke up slightly later than yesterday and left at 9:30 on foot, walking our way to several places. We started by walking by some French arcades and saw the strange shops inside. We then walked by the old stock exchange of France established by Napoleon called the Blois. We saw some interesting shopping centres and all of that, but then we came upon the Louvre, which I need not mention was very impressive, especially the pyramids in the front. Anyway, Reuter told us a good deal about the Louvre, and it was fairly interesting, but it was just more interesting to notice how huge the building was. I took a picture of the axis or road to Versailles, going through the Arc de Triomphe and the Grande Arche. It was kind of neat thought, because the road connecting the Louvre or old palace of the French monarchy and Versailles, the new one, was started in the 17th century, but not completed until this century. Furthermore, the axis is almost direct, but not quite, so there is a statue of Louis XIV in front of the Louvre, but slightly off centre, and facing the axis to go to Versailles. At the last part of the Louvre, we were standing there listening to Reuter talk, when a French bloke in the back ground just walked by and yodelled out of no where, and without any obvious provocation for doing this. Following this, we then walked down the street next to the Seine and crossed part way on a nice bridge that had a cool view of the island in the middle of Paris and looked at the bridges crossing either way in front of it, but more importantly, we were looking directly at the Academe du Françaises (I think I spelled that correctly)
It was funny with this though, because I talked to Reuter about it, and asked him when they became so nationalistic, and to this he became a bit defensive, claiming they simply wanted to promote French culture, I wanted to argue with him telling him how absurdly much they go out of their way due to xenophobia, but I thought better of it. We afterward arrived to the holocaust memorial for Parisians who died in the concentration camp, it was touching but I must confess I was not particularly moved by it. Following that, we came up to Notre Dame, which was really cool and about as interesting as I expected it to be. We went in and walked around it, but I felt guilty, because they were having mass of some sort at that time, but we went in anyway, and it rather large and interesting, and the parishioners didn’t seem to mind our presence, but there was just a huge line moving through the cathedral, so I am sure they were very used to it anyway. We came upon a much more impressive church very shortly afterward called Sainte-Chapel, and when we got there it was very humourous, because Reuter went up, and tried to give the girl at the counter a letter from our university pledging we were all students of architecture (which gets us all free admission in this cathedral) but in America we do not have our majors on our student ID cards, which is true. He then gave her my card to prove this, and she demanded to see one of our passports, which a girl produced, and following this, she said more of us needed to give them our passports, so about twelve people gave them to her, but she was still not satisfied. I swore she was going to ask to the deeds of our houses or something, but she finally was able to find a reason to deny us, and that was that the letter from our university was not stamped. It took us probably a good 15 minutes just trying to do this.
When we finally did enter the chapel, it was most elating, and I was very glad to go there. We entered the crypt first, and this was very attractive in itself, then we went upstairs. This was extraordinary, it was filled with bright stained glass, and had lots of great columns and everything, I was very glad I had gone here. The most poignant part of this to me, was the fact that it once housed the crown of thorns Christ wore (allegedly) for centuries, and only the monarchs of France were able to see it (but it is now housed in Notre Dame, and only brought out on Good Friday). So, we spent about as much time in this chapel as Reuter spent arguing with the lady about the price of the tickets. After that, we were back off, this time to the Louvre, I found something in the basement to eat (it is a huge shopping mall with a great food court on the bottom) Anyway, I ate quickly, and then discovered some of my classmates coming in and sitting down near me, so even though I had finished I sat with them for a while. One of the girls (though I now forget her name) finished eating and decided to go look around the Louvre, so I joined her. We walked around the Louvre together, and it was gigantic, and we did not see a fraction of all the wings even walking through quite quickly we did see the main things of course, the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Nike statue and all sorts of stuff, I felt so cultured out after that, but I would want to go back many times just to get a more accurate appreciation of it.
It was so neat, and the thing that I was almost most happy to see there, though I am ashamed to admit the reason for it, was the bottom pyramid on the bottom level that pointed up to one of the glass ones pointing up. It was very impressive through and through, and reminded me greatly of the Vatican in the shear immensity of its scale. We finally got out, and walked back to the hotel, which was not too far at all, and then after that, I went to the hotel room, came down and joined one of our groups to go to the restaurant Reuter recommended we eat at for supper. It was quite a fun thing to do, because I could not have asked for a more French evening, the waiter was like the perfect archetypal waiter, not rude just very French. The food was very good, and I had a taste of French wine, just to claim that I did in France. Anyway, I ordered the salmon dish, and nothing else, but I saw people wandering in with their overcoats and berets, which I did not really think happened in Paris, but apparently it does. The waiter, to clarify, had a black vest, black bow tie, trousers, and a white shirt... he carried a towel over his arm, had a thick white mustache, and was a nice old chap to have serve you at such a fine place, and apparently one of Paris’ oldest restaurants called Chartier. After we finished there, we met back at the hotel, which was just about 200 feet away, and we then took the Metro to our ‘mystery location.’
What the mystery was actually, was the circus! How cool is that, we saw the circus in Paris. It was well done, but odd because I could not understand any of it, as it was of course done entirely in French. It was funny, and really great to be at, but it was so random of a place to go. The circus’ name by the way, in case you are curious was Cirque D’Hiver, or Circus of Winter, and so yes, now I can mark that Parisian must see attraction off of the list. It seemed so French too, so I was actually happy to have gone there, and it had a variety of acts and everything. I could never believe what some of those people could do, and I thought the clowns were particularly odd looking, I mean they actually seemed extremely French as far as nationality of clowns go, because they had the simple pointy hat of French clowns, and their costume seemed quite French itself in many ways. It seemed like such a 19th century place to be, because the show was technically modern, but the building was quite 19th century in its own way, and it was just very carnal, as a circus ought to be. Well, after this, and mind you this lasted quite late (maybe 23:00) we came home, I bought another Nutella crepe, and came inside and basically wrote this, and that was the day of Jason. Hope you liked.