Rouen & Paris

Sadly vacation is almost over, and I have left the slightly urine-scented hustle and bustle of Paris for tranquil Feurs, where thankfully the school's internet is working even though it's still break! In fact, I have nothing else to do today but blog since it's both a Monday and a "jour férié" (la Toussaint), so even the places that might be open today are almost certainly closed. But picking up where I left off the other day:

Wednesday: One of my last classes at UGA was a French course on cathedrals, and one of our assignments was to do a presentation on a cathedral. Mine was Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, so feeling a certain affinity for Rouen's cathedral and knowing that the town was only a little over an hour away by train, I decided to dedicate one of my Brooke and Josh-less Paris days to a side trip to Rouen.

Rouen is definitely on the smaller side as far as cities go, but it still has a lot of interesting things to offer. My obvious first stop was the cathedral, which was an easy landmark from the train station and visible from many parts of town. Unfortunately (as is always the risk with visiting cathedrals), it was under construction, but that didn't stop me from taking a ridiculous amount of pictures anyway. In this picture I tried to capture as much of the monstrously huge facade as possible, but even backed up against the tourist office across the square it's still impossible to fit the whole thing in the frame!

Notre-Dame de Rouen is actually kind of depressing as far as cathedrals go, especially in comparison to the near-aesthetically perfect and beautifully restored Notre-Dame de Paris, which I saw the next day. Don't get me wrong; it's still magnificent, but after being bombed to bits during World War II, many of the stained glass windows that went in to replace broken ones are just clear ones.

Even a few windows make a big difference, though; the lack of colored light coming is surprisingly effective in giving the giant building a rather sterilized feeling (it probably also doesn't help that it was a very overcast day!), and looking up to see a plain window amidst many other colorful ones spoils the effect of the poor man's bible in which even the illiterate could "read"stories from the windows and be mesmerized by the church's power and magnitude.

Ok, enough of my cathedral nerdiness (for now). There's more to Rouen than a big stone building! It's also the city where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, so there's a really cool-looking church that was erected in her honor, and behind it marks the exact spot where she was burned:

I also visited the Musée de Beaux Arts de Rouen and was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was free for "students" (I'm glad I decided to bring my UGA ID with me to France... even if it is no longer exactly accurate). I was on the hunt for any of Monet's paintings of the cathedral, and the museum had one (Portail de la Cathédrale de Rouen, temps gris), though I know there are many more in the series. After a bit more aimless roaming around Rouen and tasting what turned out to be a Breton (not Norman! Thanks, Geneviève, for the distinction :) cider in a café, I took the train back to Paris.

Thursday: With only one day left before Brooke and Josh came back from London, I decided to knock out as many museums as I could that I thought wouldn't interest them as much as me. I started out at the Musée Marmottan-Monet, which houses a large collection of Monet's works as well as some other impressionist artists. Maybe it's a little cliché or unoriginal of me to like Monet's paintings so much, but there's just something about the colors he uses and about the impressionist technique that really pulls me in. I bought a couple posters from the museum's store, so now my once-barren bedroom walls are looking a bit more cheerful, though one of the ones they gave me wasn't the one I asked for! Ah well, one water lily's about as good as another, I guess.

I then hopped on the métro over to Cluny, which houses la Musée Nationale du Moyen-Age (national Middle Ages museum). This museum is best known for the six "La Dame à la Licorne" (The Lady with the Unicorn) tapestries, though it's got a lot of other really amazing relics from the Middle Ages, including stained glass windows, statues taken from cathedrals (some of which still have splashes of the original color they were painted), religious objects and parts of monks'/priests' robes dating back to the 1400s, domestic items like plates and furniture, and knights' armor on display as well.

I was feeling a bit impoverished after leaving Cluny, as I'd broken my last 10 euro bill there and was down to a handful of change (only afterwards did I learn that non-EU citizens under 26 with a visa can get in for free, grrr), but really had no regrets on spending my last few euros on a museum, even if it meant skipping dinner that night. Deciding to opt for more budget-friendly/free attractions for the afternoon, I set out for a self-guided tour of the 5e arrondisement, which took me by the Panthéon and the Jardins de Luxembourg.

And then I stopped by an ATM and made the glorious discovery that I'd finally been paid for my first month of teaching, so the long wait and depressing evaporation of my American bank account is finally over! In celebration I bought myself a ham, cheese, and egg crèpe from a street vendor for lunch, though I couldn't finish it -- for the first time in the fromage-filled history of Emily Myers' dining experience, a meal had too much cheese on it and was oozing grease instead of yummyness. I should've opted for the Nutella and banana crèpe instead, even though it wouldn't have made for a very healthy lunch!

I knew that Brooke and Josh wanted to visit Notre-Dame de Paris, but I also knew that I'd probably take way longer in my visit than they would and I'd also be happy to revisit it, so I decided to go ahead and knock it out. And by "knock it out," I mean spend two hours there, taking pictures and sitting enthralled at its beauty (or really, resting my tired feet while craning my neck and looking like a gaping-mouthed doofus).

There's no ideal time to go to Notre-Dame, since it's almost always swarming with tourists (even during services) that move in a sheep-like current through the cathedral, so taking pictures that don't include half a dozen bobbing heads or that aren't blurry due to being jostled can be difficult, but it's still very much worth a visit.

A couple more Notre-Dame de Paris photos:

To the left is a picture of the choeur (choir), as taken from the transept; I took a few long shots from the entrance of the cathedral, but sadly they all turned out blurry. This shot from closer in, however, shows the modern altar with a backdrop of gorgeous stained glass windows.

For the picture to the right, this is the view from where I was sitting; it actually took me a while to notice the TV screens posted along every few columns, which I guess they use during services. Also, in the top right of the picture, you can see where the colored light coming in from across the nave reflects on the stone walls.

Friday: Early Friday morning, I bid farewell to my sketchy hostel and went to the Gare du Nord to pick up Brooke and Josh. We decided to take advantage of the pretty weather and spend the day looking at Paris' important monuments, so after dropping off our luggage at our hotel, we took the métro over to the Arc de Triomphe. After a brief cost-benefit analysis between risking our lives playing frogger to cross the 16-street intersection and climbing the Arc, we opted to instead satisfy ourselves with a few pictures in front of it and take the safer route down the Champs-Elysées and head towards the Eiffel Tower.

La Tour Eiffel is another monument that always seems to be under some type of restoration; its base was partly covered with brown sheeting, but of course this was no detriment to our picture-taking. As with Montmartre, the area around the base of the tower was teeming with tourists and tourist traps, but we navigated the flow with wallets resting safely where they belonged (after being scammed earlier in the week, Josh was particularly emphatic with his responses of "Non! Merci!" when jangling rings of Eiffel Tower souvenirs were thrust in our faces).

Although we were already pretty tired both from being up early (Brooke and Josh had been up since 4:00am to catch their train, and I'd gotten up at 7:00am to meet them) and the excessive walking, we decided to go to the Musée d'Orsay, home to many Impressionist/post-Impressionist works. It was here that I discovered the hidden benefit of getting into museums free with a European visa, though I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the museum had temporarily loaned out 53 of its Monet paintings to another gallery, so my quest to see more Rouen cathedral paintings as well as my favorite of his paintings (Antibes) went unfulfilled. The museum itself is really cool, though; occupying a former train station, it's got a very interesting layout without being too vast and intimidating (like the Louvre). I have very vague recollections of being there when I was about eight years old, though I think like Friday it had been at the end of the day, because my eight-year-old memories are of sitting/napping in the main hall with Betsy and Dad, waiting for Mom to finish her dash through all the galleries.

At the end of the day we retreated back to the hotel with our burning feet and rested for a little while before striking out in search of dinner. We initially tried to follow the suggestion in the Lonely Planet guidebook for a delicious-sounding Turkish restaurant in the area, but when we found it to be closed we settled for a nearby French brasserie that turned out to be pretty tasty itself. Brooke had been running through her French vocabulary since the first day and kept mentioning "canard" (duck), so Josh and I talked her into trying the duck confit, even though none of us could define exactly what "confit" meant. It was a good choice; thankfully my cold had abated enough that I could both feel not guilty trading bites with Brooke and Josh, and I could also taste the dishes I was trying! Josh's steak also looked tasty, and my salmon with rice was good (if not really inspired).

As an apéritif, I had them try kir, which is a glass of white wine with a little bit of crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur). I've tried it before and liked it, but I got a big kick out of Josh and Brooke trying it for the first time... at first, Brooke's face was twisted up in disgust, and then settled into a nod of mild acceptance, and she said she liked it after thinking about if for a moment or two. For dessert, Brooke had crème brûlée, Josh had "tarte tatin" (apple pie with ice cream), and I had "glace mystère", a ball of vanilla ice cream wrapped around meringue, dipped in chopped almonds/walnuts and drizzled with caramel.

Oh man, I am getting ravenous just reflecting on it... I made sure to clean out the pantry of all perishables before leaving Feurs, not thinking that when I got back it would be Sunday and then Monday and no stores would be open, so plain pasta has been my only option for the past couple of meals. Tomorrow is market day, though, so there's only one more dinner of plain pasta between me and fresh fruit and veggies!

Saturday was the Louvre and Sunday I had to head back to Feurs, but those will have to wait for another day. Despite plucking away at this all afternoon, my 7:00 internet cut-off approaches and I'm still not done. Actually, looking back on this entry, it's kind of ridiculously long. Sorry about that! I'll close with an image of sunset from our hotel: