June 6
I went off on my own today after class. Sometimes sightseeing on your own is fantastic, since there is no one to slow you down or rush you through anything you want to see. On the other hand, there's no one to whom I can turn to say, Holy Gargoyles! Look at that rose window! It's the largest in Europe! which makes the experience slightly less cool, or at least not as cool as it could be.
That being said, I traveled to Notre Dame. I'd visited it before on my weekend trip to Paris in 2002, but I didn't go in at the time because mass was being said, and I didn't climb to the top. Today I did both, and it was well worth the wait. The vaulted ceilings are monumental, and incredibly gorgeous. Without those famous flying buttresses, the whole place would cave in on
itself. Incredible. And there are THREE marvelous rose windows telling Mary's story. Mind-boggling. My pictures are only okay....you'd be better served by a google image search than my flashless photos.I then suffered through a French woman's (fairly common) inability to respect lines in order to climb to the top and see Paris from above. On the climb you get a closer look at the delicate intricacies of the facade, the archways, the gargoyles made famous in a WB cartoon, and the bell Quasimodo rang only in fiction. It was pretty cool...particularly the views of Paris. The Eiffel Tower and the Seine, or Sacre Coeur at Montmartre on the other side.
I had dinner that night in a cafe by myself. That's when I missed Darick. Dinner by myself used to be fine, and now I'm spoiled.
As a side note, the French ability to eat beef tartare (raw ground hamburger meat) baffles me. Baffles.
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1 comment:
Raw hamburger meat? Yick! That sounds worse than goetta, by a long shot.
Can I just say how jealous I am that you are traipsing about Europe and I am sitting in my office in St. Louis. I mean, as cool as it is to have my own office, I want to hang out in Europe!
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