Thursday
The first shot of the Eiffel Tower.
The picturesque buildings along the Seine.
Paris!
The Orsay Museum across the Seine.
The big clock in the Orsay Museum.
Me, thinking about impressionism.
A long view of the main gallery. The Orsay used to be a train station.
Friday
Sacre-Coeur in Montmartre.
An old windmill in Montmartre that we saw on our walk.
I bet you wouldn't have guessed that this is all there is to see at Renoir's house.
I am sitting in the same spot at Les Deux Moulins that the guy was sitting in when Amelie was writing on the clear board! AMELIE!
The Louvre.
The Louvre Museum. Home to many, many, many, many, many famous works of art.Saturday
Saturday, we took a walking tour of Pere Lachaise Cemetery, to see famous graves. After a picnic lunch, we started the walking tour as it started to hail on us. Some of the monuments are absolutely magnificent, and the cemetery was huge.
Oscar Wilde's grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetary.
Lots of people leave lipstick kisses on Wilde's grave in his memory. It's kind of gross and ugly, actually. Oscar Wilde died of an ear infection.
Heloise and Abelard are also buried here. Other famous graves include those of Jim Morrison of the Doors, Gertude Stein, Edith Piaf, Frederick Chopin, and The Paris Communards.
After our cemetery walk, we went back to the Louvre and started the arduous walk to l'Arc de Triomphe through the Tuileries and up the Champs Elysee. Here I am, setting out.
This is before it started to hail, naturally. The Champs Elysee is lined with fancy shops, overpriced cafes, and of course, McDonald's (which we ate at).
Oh-so-happy to be in Paris!
Even though it was wet and nearly unbearably cold, the sky was beautiful.
We finally made it all the way to the Arc, and we were cold and wet and ready to go back to our hostel, change, and go get something TASTY to eat. We had a classic Italian dinner...go figure!Sunday
The St. Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral on rue Daru. I went to liturgy in the crypt chapel (I don't think that there are actually people buried there, but they call the basement the crypt in any case) and it was all in French! And the bishop was there! And there was an ordination! And Fr. Michel Fortunatto was directing the amazing choir, which was pretty rad, I must say. I think that the cathedral is closely connected with St. Sergius Theological School.
After church, I met up with the rest of the group for lunch, and we decided to go see stuff on the Ile-de-Paris, which has been inhabited for centuries! St. Genvieve settled there in the eighth century as the abbess of a monastery. Here is a view of the Eiffel Tower from the Island.
Oxford may not be the only towery city that is branchy between towers (G.M. Hopkins)
Sainte-Chappelle from the outside.
Sainte-Chappelle from the inside. This was the personal chapel for the Kings of France (built in the 13th century) and housed the relics of the Passion of Christ, consisting of a large piece of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns, among other relics. Those are no longer at Sainte-Chappelle, but have been distributed; the Crown of Thorns is in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, of Hunchback fame. Because of the strategic location of the Island in the middle of the Seine, this building was used as a palace for many centuries, until the Kings of France decided that they wanted more decadent palaces in other parts of the now-expanded Paris and in other parts of their kingdom. It is now the Palace of Justice, where the highest courts in the land convene.
The rose window depicts St. John's Apocalypse.
While waiting for Lydia to meet us, I saw this sign that reminded me of George-Michael Bluth. 'Oh, it’s so cute. She sometimes takes a little pack of mayonnaise, and she’ll squirt it in her mouth all over, and then she’ll take an egg and kind of... Mmmm! She calls it a "mayonegg".' See if you can spot the 'mayonegg' in this picture of a cafe menu!
Notre Dame. I went in. It was the same as last time.
On our last night in Paris, we finally made it to the Eiffel Tower. It looked really awesome.
This one came out artsier than I had intended. But that's not a bad thing.
Some 'street art' from the plaza-viewing-thingy at the end of the grass mall between the Eiffel Tower and l'Ecole Militaire. Remember, Mom, when that guy offered us hasheesh so good that it would make us see TWO Eiffel Towers?
We got a little bit closer, hoping that it would start sparkling soon. It did eventually, and it was pretty cool. Especially in the fog.
Group photo! The fog and rain added a nice artistic touch to what could have been a woefully typical tourist photo.
Ghosts at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. We went and got coffee and tea, the went back to sleep in our relatively warm beds before heading off for Oxford again the next day.
3 comments:
You are quite the photographer Erin!!! You look so cute in all of your pictures-I can tell that you are having a blast! (love the nose ring!)
Erin--
Hey its Mike Bike! A lot of those pictures were pretty cool Er Bear.
The graves of Oscar Wilde and Abelard and Heloise were crazy. Especially the weird egyptian sculpture.
The city scenes look like fun; would you say metropolitan areas in Europe are cooler and more lively than those in the US?
And if u can answer this (I don't know if u can) what kind of Orthodox presence did you encounter in France?
Maria - Thanks! I like my nose ring too. :)
Mike-Bike - I think that I like London better than I like Paris, although I feel like I got to know Paris as a city better this time that I visited, and that I could reasonably imagine myself living there. I liked Paris better than L.A., but not better than I like San Francisco.
Paris was a place of refuge for Christians escaping the Communists in the early twentieth century. St. John of San Francisco lived there for a while, having left Russia to escape the Soviets. There is also the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, which has produced such recently eminent Orthodox thinkers as Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Fr. John Meyendorff, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, and others. There are many Orthodox churches in Paris, actually, mostly Russian, Serbian, and Romanian, with a few Greek parishes for good measure. I don't know what the atmosphere is in the Orthodox community generally, but when I was at a French language service, there were a good mix of people of different ages - noisy children, reverent babushki, and people our age as well. They also ordained a new priest that day. The community I visited seemed, from external criteria, to be rather healthy.
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