paris

10 o’clock Saturday evening:  

I arrive in Paris, the city of lights, the city of love, the city with a history stretching back to the Roman empire, the city that has inspired artists and intellectuals and philosophers and revolutionaries for centuries.  Not such a bad place to be.  I’m here to stay with Lyse, my second cousin who's here studying for the fall at Science Po and tomorrow, and see Nina, my friend from Seattle who's on a European exchange from her Swedish Masters in Anthropology program to study here until December.

Coming out of the subway stop to meet Lyse, I was greeted by the center of the traffic-round-about of six lion statues spouting water out of their mouths, (not so bad) and her smiling face.  Seven stories up her apartment building’s wooden spiral staircase, we reach her absolutely adorable Parisian home – two rooms plus a kitchen and bathroom, bright colors, a deep bathtub (but no place to stand and shower), and a view of the whole neighbourhood.  We stayed up late catching up and swapping French bureaucracy war stories.

 Sunday, Day 1:

  

Today was lovely, sunny and warm and full of beautiful wanderings and good food and catching up with friends.  We slept in, had tea and breakfast in Lyse's sunny top floor apartment, and set off to wander.  Starting at the Louvre, we worked our way up and down the Jardins de Touilleries, passing statues and tourists and locals taking in October sunrays.  From the Louvre and Palais Royale, we walked down to the Mirais (the Jewish quarter), which is the one humming neighbourhood on a Sunday, to meet Nina.  Having found my long lost Swede, we honed in on a falafel restaurant (craftily following the trail of happy people with street food) and had a fantastic lunch.  They seriously knew what they were doing with that kitchen. I was planning on taking a picture, but… I was hungry.  It disappeared very quickly....

We were in Paris, so some shopping may or may not have happened.  Sizes are different in French, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.  Lyse went to go pick up her boyfriend, Simon, from the airport (he’s here for almost two weeks to visit Paris for the first time) and Nina and I went on a lovely date, splitting a slice of cheesecake and sitting on the bank of the Seine people watching for a little before meandering past the Notre Dame… I sent Nina home, to rest up before her first day of real French classes, and made my way back to Lyse’s to meet Simon, where the three of us helped him combat jetlag by staying up until past midnight talking politics, comparing American, Canadian, and French customs and policies, and figuring out all the basics for saving the world.  Lyse is taking some history courses here, as well as being well-informed about the major monuments and events of Paris, and talking with her all weekend got me re-excited about history.  I’d love to do some investigations into the history of the churches of Toulouse – from her guidebook, we have the most pure Romanesque church in Europe, built in 1049, and another one that exhibits a mishmash of architecture styles from throughout the two centuries it took to build it – and the history of the region in general.  My efforts to figure out the best way to do that (French vs English? For credit vs not? Online vs In-person classes?) are continuing, but the motivation is much higher.

Monday Day 2:

Sunlight streaming in through the windows signaled the start of another slow morning, today with fresh pastries from the bakery downstairs and tea, before we headed out to Notre Dame.  Simon, Lyse and I hopped on the Metro, switching to some combination of French and quiet English (gotta love Canadians) and smiling to ourselves about the lovely Frenchman in a suit eating his baguette sandwich and éclair.  Sooooo French.

So, Notre Dame.  Again, I think all of us caught the history bug – seeing a building that old, that huge, and that intricate, forces you to wonder about the people who watched it getting built and whether they knew it would continue to compel people to come visit it this many centuries later.  What were the stories of the designers, the craftsmen, the quarrymen?  From whose imagination were the faces of the gargoyles born, who first dreamed of a stained-glass archway on such a massive scale?

Emmanuel

We climbed the stone spiral staircase up and up and up to the first landing, at the north-west corner of the building, with a view from Mont-Martre to the Eiffel Tower.  Inching past gargoyles and stone demons in the Galerie des Chimères along the western façade of the church, we took in Paris from above.  From there, we ducked through the hobbit-sized door into Quasimodo’s domain.  Up dark, age-smoothed wooden stairs, the bourdon, the church’s largest bell, hung silent, rung only on the major Catholic holidays.  They have four smaller bells in the north tower that mark the time, and the layer of dust on this one – christened Emmanuel – begged for someone to duck under the flimsy rope to commit what I’m sure must be some kind of horrible crime.  I contained myself, though as Lyse said, once it’s rung, it’s not as though they can un-ring it….  Now towards the top of my to-do list: read Notre Dame de Paris in Victor Hugo’s original French. 

Up another spiral staircase equally long, you reach the top of the church.  The stone is worn down in the middle of each step, a smooth indent in each stair from millions of feet making the trek up to the height of the southern tower for a full panorama of the city. 

As nice as the view from the top is, the inside of the church is where its scale becomes more dazzling.  The size of the arches, the many alcoves for prayer to individual saints, the walls themselves… throughout the entire building you can feel the history, the weight of centuries of people’s desperate prayers and joyful hopes and searching questions… Even as a very clearly not-anything-close-to-Catholic, the stories in the stones of the building are compelling.

From Notre Dame, we went to a café near the train station to meet up with Nina for a late lunch before I hopped on the train back to Toulouse.  Five hours of reading and journaling later, I made it back to my now ”normal” life – renewed and ready to dive into a week full of rehearsals all day everyday for La Reine Morte and Nutcracker.  It was great to have gotten the chance to be in Paris without having any strong tourist-y agenda, so I could focus on just being where I was and who I was with instead of trying to race through a checklist of Must-See's.  I can't wait to go back and continue exploring more of what Paris -- and all of France -- has to offer.  All in all, a very successful weekend!