After we got back on the bus from the ferry, it was another four or five hours before we got to the station in Paris. I dozed for probably two, which was helpful, but Lydia and I were really pretty dead by the time we arrived.
As soon as we got off the bus and into the station though, I was hit so hard with culture shock. I've never experienced anything like it before. My American naiivety was a shot in the foot; there was zero english anywhere. I knew that our hotel was supposed to be very close to the station, but short of following the occasional picture, I didn't even know how to get out of the building for sure.
Lydia's water bottle had opened while we were asleep and soaked her backpack pretty good. She was so tired though, so I offered to take it and get it dried in a bathroom for her, since they all have automatic driers. So as soon as we got off we made a search for a bathroom. We found one after a little bit, but it was a paid bathroom. Fortunately I had a good bit of euros left over from when we were in Ireland (holy smokes, that was eons ago!!) so I was able to quickly take care of the small fee, but it was so unusually nerve-racking to try to work with the teller there while they were speaking only French.
P.S., I've seen a zillion public restrooms now, but I have NEVER seen anything more disgusting than that Paris bus stop bathroom. It was like a biologist's dream lab in there, I swear the stuff in the grouts can not only move on it's own but it should start developing a self-awareness by this time next Tuesday. You think I'm kidding.
There indeed was a hand blow-drier along the greasy tiled wall (it's a bathroom. Why the heck are the tiled walls greasy???) so I plopped the soaking back of Lydia's backpack on top and moved my hand along the sensor for a few minutes. After I had not only caused the traffic to redirect to every other drier in the room (meaning, the other one) and had given mine the workout of its scary life, I found that Lydia's backpack was just dry enough to get to the nearby hotel.
We made our way out of the bus station and out to a drop off area. I was doing everything I could to seem brave, though the worst part was that I really didn't think I should be so shell-shocked for not having seen anything yet. Frustrating.
To my relief, the hotel was literally right around the corner. We had looked up how to get there on google maps the day before, and had charted at least a block and a half distance, but this was like half a block away! We went inside and were also fortunately told that we could go right up to our room then, even though it was like 7am.
For some reason I was under the impression that we were going to another hostel all this time, so I reminded Lyd that we should probably be very quiet as we went in, so we didn't wake anyone up. She gave me a funny look and said that we had the place to ourselves. I must have looked incredulous as she opened the door with our key to a perfectly quiet 2-person bedroom with a bathroom in the corner.
Holy moley, it was an absolutely gorgeous sight! I was so excited that I almost moved fast!
We plopped our bags on each side of the beds and sat down.
'Do you think we should maybe sleep for a little bit before we go to the big city?' Lydia asked me.
'That's exactly what I was thinking' I responded.
So with that, we set our alarms for one hour and fell right to sleep.
Three hours later, we finally decided to get up. We woke up once each hour, looked over at each other, laughed, and then set the alarm for another hour later. But by 11am, we were both feeling a ton better and were ready to stop wasting time and go see Paris.
The bus station we arrived at is also a metro station (awesome, right??) so we walked around the little corner and down into the metro. Tom had told us that most everything big was within walking distance, so we decided to each get the 10-pass deal. The French man working the ticket booth was not a happy camper though, to put it lightly. I don't know what his story was, but I think he needed more than a three hour nap before he felt better. He snapped at us a bit when he realized he had to speak English and wouldn't take anything except exact change or card. We had wondered about this, so we already had our cards in hand. For some reason, Lydia's card doesn't work at all in some spots, so after she tried it two or three times and Mr. Timebomb looked close to popping, I swiped my card and saved the lives of everyone in the station. Nbd.
Lydia and I are pretty great about covering each other as we travel. Seriously, she is so awesome to travel with. She is super great to plan with, we have always had super similar interests and disinterests in activities and places to go, and she is so good about keeping cool when the chips are down. So when I say that it really was no big deal to use my card, I really mean it, because we have been able to help each other out so often this trip that it just kind of happens. No joke, I am so lucky to be traveling with Lyd.
After we had our tickets, we stepped back towards the end of the line to watch how these new ticket stiles worked. Most of the people were using the chip-scanner cards that regular commuters have, so we weren't getting a lot of hints. While we waited for someone to use a ticket, we heard something wonderful: another young female American accent. I turned around and saw a girl our age talking with a French woman by the metro map. This kind woman was helping the girl figure out what metros to take to get to her hostel. The girl jotted down a bunch of notes in a notebook and the two parted. I could tell she was definitely alone and had just arrived on the last bus, so I walked over and said hello.
She looked a little nervous at first (as is only normal when I approach some people, though I didn't know my precedence would follow me out of the country so fast. Boy, the paparazzi are a lot faster than I realized!) but after I introduced myself and we realized we were both in the same boat, she looked extremely relieved (also normal, just by the way ;) ). Her name was Kelsey and she was indeed here in Paris alone for four days, just seeing the sights. Lydia and I looked at each other for a quick second before I asked Kelsey if she wanted to join us as we toured around. She breathed a huge sigh of relief and said that she would love to, but she had to go drop her things off at her hostel first. So we decided to meet up in front of Notre Dame at 3 and then split up.
We still hadn't seen anyone else use a ticket yet, so I just went for it. I put my ticket in the small slot, sort of similar to the tube stops in London, the ticket went all the way through, and there was no buzzing X, but the gates wouldn't open. I walked through the turn stile anyway, but the big gates were still shut. I tried backing out, but they don't really work like that. Feeling panicked, I hopped the turn stile and went back. I watched as a few more people went through and realized that I had come upon a set of gates that didn't open automatically anymore. Yeah, you push it. So, putting my first dead ticket in my pocket, I stuffed another ticket in, walked through the stile as I swiped my second dead ticket from the top, and pushed open the big gates. Lydia followed soon after and we made our way into the metro.
We would have been dead if we didn't already have the subway system down. Seriously, there was no English to be found anywhere, so if we had been newbies at the whole public train system, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere but VERY lost. So after we compared our metro map to our sites and museum map, we picked our destination and hopped on the train.
Well I won't pretend to remember what the station names were called. We just looked at the first or last few letters mostly, the rest was absolute gibberish to us. Naiive? Yes. Did that bug me? Not as much as it should have. Did I care then? Not a bit. We originally tried pointing stops out by their full names, but after our first horrifically failed attempts, we realized that if we didn't find some sort of alternative soon that we would probably be heard INTENTIONALLY butchering the pronunciations and then get strung up by the Eiffel Tower for our insolence or something.
So we made our first stop the place that Tom told us we couldn't not go see: Saint Chapelle. I wasn't super gung-ho about seeing another little church, especially with so many other huge things around, but I know enough to listen if Tom talks about his favorites. We also knew that they would sell the magic museum pass there (a pass that gets you into many of the other big museums for free afterwards while also allowing you to skip the lines of people buying their own passes or just normal tickets) and with a smaller line than we would find at Notre Dame or the Louvre.
As we walked to the little doorway entrance, we stopped for a bite of lunch at a little pizza place. The pizza was absolutely delicious, but when we both saw the desserts in the window, we splurged. (Alert: I didn't follow any sort of calorie budget in Paris. Don't be a hater, it was the chance of a lifetime). So while my tomato and chicken pizza was amazing, my gorgeous shaved chocolate tart was OUT OF THIS WORLD!! I thought my mouth was going to abandon me and live forever among the bakeries of Paris! Good grief, chocolate is amazing.
Back to traveling; we walked down the street after lunch and walked to the uninteresting doorway that represented the entrance to Saint Chapelle. We went inside and found ourselves in a line that lead to a hidden cobble-stoned courtyard. It was really nice in there, all ancient stone walls enclosing us and the walls of the church ornamented in the beautiful Gothic style. I think it is so fun to look at all the different faces gargoyles can make.
The line wound around to a farther courtyard and eventually to a beautiful stone archway. We paid for our museum passes in line (they are only good for two days, so we arranged for them to start tomorrow and paid the €5 for this site). It was just before we went inside that I noticed a bunch of big posters for a concert that was going on there in Saint Chapelle. As I got reading the signs, I realized that it was a professional chamber orchestra, one of the best in Europe, that was performing a series of Vivaldi's greatest works. There were only three concerts, and the very last was that evening! I pointed the sign out to Lydia and asked her if she would be interested at all in a chamber orchestra concert that night, and she said that she definitely was. I was absolutely thrilled!
By this time, we had made it to the top of the line and went inside. The entire chapel was two floors, one room on each floor. We entered the ground floor and found that the room wasn't very big. It was long, but not incredibly wide, and the ceiling was rather low for a chapel, but it was beautiful. The building had been restored, so all of the old paint and gold leaf had been put up all throughout the room. It was so gorgeous. Every wall, every pillar, every ornament on the ceiling was elegantly painted with symbols and shapes and gold. And all along the walls, the large spaces between each pillar had been painted to look like a simple tapestry was draped across. Seriously, I thought it was cloth the first times I looked at it, so it took me a few minutes to realize that it was just a paining on the wall.
Despite the beauty of the place, I was surprised. i had remembered Tom saying something about the windows of the place, but there was not a single window in the entire room. As we headed back towards the entry we had come from, we noticed a tiny little doorway to a very thin spiral staircase in each corner opposite the lone door. Many people were coming down from the left stairs, so we went up the right staircase. It was a very surprisingly long staircase, and then turned very sharply at the top so you had to walk around a long wall corner before you were through the staircase door.
I know I keep saying that everything is beautiful here. That's because it is. And I don't know how often I've said something is my favorite. If I have, that's because I meant it and I'm relating things in an accurate timeline, not a general overview. But I'm running out of thesaurus power now that I'm on day 49, and so you'll have to forgive me if this doesn't really paint anything close to what actually happened. Because I'm pretty sure it can't. I don't know enough words to explain how vastly and uniquely beautiful the upper room of Saint Chapelle is from the other incredible things I have also seen. So if you, gentle reader, happen to be anyone other than me, I am tragically sorry for what this won't do for you.
I turned the upper corner and walked into a vaulted room with amazingly tall walls...
...walls made entirely of the most complex and intricate stained glass I've ever seen. The whole giant room, with the exception of the ceiling, floor, and far skinny wall was glass. Reds, blues, golds, greens, a tiny bit of white...a kaleidoscope of vibrant colors, lit up by the sun in Paris. The floor was laced with black loops and swirls in the tile work. The ceiling went up and up almost out of sight. I have never been in a more beautiful room in my life, I promise you that.
On our way out, we found the concert ticket office and got some of the last remaining tickets, but we got them for only 16 euro apiece because of the student discount, rather than the 25 euro they are usually sold for!
We left. After a bit of a walk, we made our way to the cathedral of Notre Dame. I thought it was going to be just another cathedral, and that meeting Kelsey there would be simple, but it turns out that the square in front of Notre Dame is so big and constantly full of people that a huge section of ampetheatre seating. Yeah, huge.
So we walked up to the ampetheatre seats and sat before the enormous cathedral face. Holy sculptures, batman. I have seen a ton of cathedrals now, but the face of Notre Dame must have at least a hundred different people carved upon it. It's amazing!
Well, I remembered what color of shirt Kelsey was wearing (navy blue plaid flannel) so I looked around down below and actually spotted her like ten seconds later. So we went down, met her, and actually stood in a big long line that went into the cathedral for free. For free! Apparently Notre Dame does not require any sort of fee to get into, so we walked in and around the great home of the hunchback.
I wished it wasn't so full of chairs along the middle, but it was gigantic nonetheless. We walked the full outside aisles and it wasn't the most beautiful cathedral I've seen (I think Glauchester still holds that title) but it was incredible.
After we left the cathedral, we decided to walk up to the Eiffel Tower, since we could see the top in the distance. So the three of us took a lovely long walk down the river Siene I think its called. Along the way we came to a bridge, one of many, but this one literally glittered with gold, even though it was a chain link fence. We walked up the bridge to see what was up, and found thousands of gold padlocks that were locked to every available inch of bridge. Every lock had two names written on it. They are the famous Paris love locks, and they were a fantastic sight indeed. Apparently the tradition is that a couple in love will write one another's name on the lock, keep one of the three keys, lock it on the bridge, and then throw the final key into the river below. Cute huh? Up until the part where if the relationship ends horribly then one of them can come back with their key and take the lock off. But I really liked the idea up until that point anyway :)
So we walked for about an hour down the river until we came to the great Eiffel Tower. I had heard from someone that it was pretty small. They lied. The tower was so much bigger than I imagined!! It was incredible! So we sat underneath one of the giant legs for a while and rested. We assumed that it was like 45 euro to go up to the top, so we didn't even bother check. We were there for probably a half hour, just admiring the view when we decided to part ways for dinner and for our concert. So we walked back to the metro and set up a meeting place and time for the next morning and then said goodbye to Kelsey for the day.
Lydia and I went back to Notre Dame to see if we could find any cheap places for dinner before we went back to the hotel. We were so dead tired, but weren't tired enough to pay the standard 12 euro dinner fees that just about every place was asking for. So we walked down the streets a ways and finally found a street like we were used to: tiny, full of itty bitty shops, lots of people, and everything you could imagine being sold from one end of the block to the other. We felt right at home as we walked along the thin road, shop owners calling out their wares and prices to us. It was great! We stopped at a couple of shops within our price range, between 4 and 7 euro, but didn't stop until we got to a panini, baguette, and crepe shop. It was there that I got my very first taste of panini and real Parisian crepe. I was shocked when the guy handed me my toasted panini, it was so flat I thought that he forgot the top three-quarters of my sandwich. But it was just pressed and toasted to perfection, and the beef, tomatoe, and mozzarella insides tasted superb! Lydia and I also split a traditional crepe: butter, sugar, and cinnamon. I think the butter, sugar, and lemon crepe probably would have been even better, but it was still fantastic.
We took our takeaway back over to the ampetheatre seating at Notre Dame to eat. What an absolutely sublime view for a dinner on such a sunny evening! Really, that was an awesome 5 euro dinner!
After we finished dinner, we headed back to Saint Chapelle, but via a fountain we had seen around the bend. After we had crossed the few streets to the road island, we found some incredible statues of St. Michael slaying a dragon. It really was an amazing fountain!
We then walked the few remaining blocks back to the beautiful Saint Chapelle. We were there a little early, just to be safe, so we stood in line for a while. Slowly, the line was moved farther and farther inside the courtyard and up into the chapel. I was absolutely delighted to find that the windows still glowed magnificently in the evening light like they did in the morning light. I was also thrilled to see that the whole hall-like room had been filled with wooden chairs, and that a harpsichord and some stands were set up under the decorative sacrament arch at the head of the room. Because we had gotten there early, we were very close to the top of the line, so we got the very best seats in our section.
I think we waited there around half an hour before the six Baroque professionals came out and everything but the small makeshift stage was darkened, but because we were all still trying to soak in what we were seeing, it seemed like ten. But eventually, the six came out and began their playing.
[Saint Chapelle]
As a crude sum up, it was the most magnificent concert I've ever been to and I learned a lot about myself.
After the concert was over, I actually bought two CDs, I loved it that much! The soloist actually came out and signed one of my CDs, so that made it even better!
After we walked out, we sat on the beautiful giant marble steps of the Justice building right next door and just looked at the city for a bit before we went home on the metro. When we got home, we got on the wifi for a bit to check emails and such. Nick was actually online then so I was able to chat with him briefly before I had to go take a shower and get ready for bed. Once done, I finished off the day, and then, exhausted, crashed for the rest of the night.
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