Paris Day #1: Monday

Notre-Dame de Paris at night (I took this Sunday night after dinner)

Wow the last two days have been a blur. When we were en route from Giverny to Paris Dr. Barbour gave us all a list of sights/museums we needed to see during our six-day (really five-day, we leave Saturday morning) stay. While it's certainly not everything in Paris, the list is very comprehensive. I've spent the last two days trying to get to as many of those sights as possible. But I don't want to give you the impression I've been doing the crazed tourist mad dash through the city. I've been taking my time at each of the museums/sights and spending as much time as I want, but just spending the whole day doing it. My schedule for the last two days has been thus:

8am: Wake up, go for a run along the Seine
9am: Breakfast at the hotel (baguette, OJ)
9:30am - 4pm: Sight-see
5pm - 6pm: Return to hotel, relax
6pm - ?: Theatre/Musical performance with the group

So you can understand why I am a bit fatigued. I've decided to take tomorrow off from running because my legs are so tired. Dr. Barbour got us museum passes and metro passes for our stay, so it's very easy for us to move around the city. Monday I went around with Carolyn because we met up with our friend Jess for a quick lunch before she had to go to class. Jess went to Wake our freshman year and played on RUCKUS. She transferred to William & Mary our freshman year and I haven't seen her in a while, so it was great to catch up. She is spending the semester in Paris through another program. Carolyn and I saw a ton on Monday:

• St. Germain-de-Pres
• St. Séverin (see photo of the column on the right. This is in the more contemporary part of the chapel (15th century, as opposed to 13th), and something I've never seen before. After going lots of old churches over the last month, I'm starting to notice those elements which make any given one unique.
  
• Église St. Julien-le-Pauvre
• La Sorbonne

• Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden)
• Place de la Concorde

• Église La Madeleine (Church of Mary Magdalene). This church was very interesting. From the exterior, it doesn't look like a church at all (at least, not like most of the cathedrals I've seen in the last few weeks. It's done in the neoclassical style and has a dome to let in light, rather than windows. On the inside, all of the walls are painted and there is gold everywhere. On the altar is a giant statue of Mary Magdalene, and the paintings above it feature her prominently at Jesus's right hand. Even the chandeliers inside seemed like they would be more natural in a train station, rather than a church (you can sort of see them in the picture of the statue on the right). I guess it's just my Protestant roots, but it always seems odd to me when I go in a church and visual focus is on a person, rather than Jesus.
  

• Opera Garnier (think "Phantom of the Opera"). Carolyn and I didn't get a chance to go inside, so we went back today, but the main auditorium was closed because of a dress rehearsal. So we're going to try and go on Thursday morning before our tour of the Louvre at 10:30am.
• Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysee

That night we went with Dr. Barbour and the group to "La Comedie" and saw a play called "Figaro Divorce." We thought we were going to see Moliere's L'Avare, but apparently that was Sunday night. "Figaro Divorce" was very difficult to follow and three hours long. But I think the difficulty in following it came from the writer's style, not from the dialogue, which I could translate just fine.

Oh, something interesting which happened that day. At one point while we were riding the metro between monuments, Carolyn and I got onto a train where a Frenchman was proselytizing loudly. As in, no one else was talking but he was shouting (in French) about the Revelation and the Second Coming and repentance. He was not addressing anyone directly, but his shouting was obviously making people uncomfortable. Carolyn and I ended up getting off a few stops early just because the mood in the car was getting tense. I could understand everything he said and none of it was violent, but anyone using that tone in a public transportation vehicle makes me nervous. Not a big deal, just something that happened.