July 23- Paris

We didn’t get breakfast in the hotel because we had to pay extra for it and, judging from the room, we didn’t expect it to amount to much. We took a little extra time getting up this morning because we were all tired, but once we got up we went to the nearby McDonald’s for breakfast. Then we relied on the kindness of strangers to help us find the train station and get us to the historic Ile de Cité part of Paris.

We had Rick Steves as a guide on our mp3 players again, and Julie and Scott were following his “Historic Paris Walk” tour. It starts at Notre Dame cathedral, and it was not hard to find once the Metro dropped us off. Mr. Steves’s narration told how the cathedral itself took 200 years to build and asked us to imagine how a tiny medieval village could muster the resources to devote to building such a structure. We examined many of the exterior details on the façade, including the gargoyles, before we ventured inside. Like Milan, the interior of the cathedral strikes our modern eyes as being very dark. The grey stone of the exterior is continued throughout the interior. However, to look at it through medieval eyes in the days before electricity, it probably looked very bright. The large stained glass windows of gothic architecture were an innovation for the time, allowing much more light into the interior of a church. Certainly the enormous space had to be impressive to medieval eyes. The arches of the ceiling are ten stories high. You can climb to the level of the gargoyles for a view of Paris that the hunchback would have enjoyed, but the line was too long to wait in. Perhaps we’ll see Quasimodo’s view some other time.

After a stroll through Notre Dame, we had lunch in a little restaurant on the Left Bank. …OK, it was a Subway, but that’s not the point. It was in fact a little restaurant on the Left Bank, so there. We returned to the cathedral and continued our stroll around it. The Deportation Memorial at the end of the island remembers the 200,000 French who were taken away by the Nazis, never to return. Unfortunately it was closed when we were there. Instead, we followed Mr. Steves back over the Seine to the Left Bank again. Anna bought several more scarves and she and Emma both bought little clocks with “Paris” on them. The pretty French girl who waited on them gave them both little Eiffel towers on key chains.

We were finishing a stroll through the Latin Quarter and were looking for the Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore, when we heard someone yell, “Scott!” It turned out to be George Olmsted who is a social studies teacher at West Seneca West Middle School, our sister school. He and his wife are just starting a month in Europe. As it turns out, they were following the Rick Steves tour too. We traded stories for a few minutes and we each took some pictures to remember the chance meeting on the Left Bank.

The three girls got some sorbet and ate it by the large statue of the angel Michael killing a devil at Place St. Michael. From there, we continued back across the Seine. Scott was a little disappointed that we didn’t see the inside of Sainte-Chapelle because the stained glass and light is supposed to be amazing. We started to wait in line but it was enormously long, and we couldn’t see that it was moving at all. The church shares the space with the French Supreme Court, and the gendarmes moved the line because it had gotten so long it was blocking their traffic gate. In the move, we lost space as people jostled ahead and we still didn’t see that the line was actually moving, so we decided to press on. On the far side of the building we sat in the little park called Place Dauphine and watched while a judge or a lawyer got his portrait taken in his robes on the steps and while someone else was interviewed for TV news. We crossed the Seine to the Right Bank at Pont Neuf, the “New Bridge” that is now actually the oldest bridge in Paris. We decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in the Louvre.

As we’ve been scurrying through Europe over the past few weeks, we’ve occasionally wondered not at the things were pausing to see, but at the things we were flying past and skipping. In our efforts to see the “Greatest Hits” of what Europe has to offer, we’re certainly aware that we are driving past an enormous number of sites. Why aren’t we stopping to see them? We pick and we choose trying to see the highlights that we can. If we’re ignoring something that’s older than America itself, it’s partly because there are so many of those buildings to choose from. Some stand out in our American consciousness. The vast sea of other potentially interesting sites haven’t been pointed out as interesting too, or more likely, in our ignorance, we miss things that we should have seen. If any of these individual sites were anyplace else on its own, we’d probably stop and gawk and take pictures just like we do at the most famous sites. But we just plain don’t have the time to see everything. The Louvre is like a microcosm of that experience, distilled and intensified. Like so many other tourists visiting for the first time we have to fly by masterpieces without even a glance and ignore entire wings of the gigantic museum because there’s just no other way to do it. Rick Steves helped guide us to a few of the Greatest Hits of the Louvre, but it was really the tip of an iceberg that we could hardly begin to chip at.

We walked through the courtyards of the huge building from the back, and proceeded to the big glass pyramids at the front of the building where everyone enters. Julie appreciated being able to check our day bag for a while and free up her arms. No sooner had she done that than Emma fell asleep, and Mom had to carry her around for much of the Louvre instead. Rick Steves’s tour starts with some of the Greek art, but it seems that this wing is being re-done, so it was a confusing start for us. We certainly caught up with his tour in time to see the Venus di Milo. Like all of the highlights we visited, she was so surrounded by tourists that she was hard to get close to. Not only that but it was hard to move away from her without walking in front of someone trying to frame a photograph. Flash photography is forbidden, but other than that picture taking is allowed. Scott certainly enjoyed that and took a lot of video as a result, but it does seem that there was never a pathway that didn’t cut in front of someone trying to take a picture. We continued through the ancient Classical world to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Even headless and broken, it’s a dramatic statue, made even more-so because of its placement at the top of a grand staircase. This position also gave more people a chance to photograph it.

After a few other stops, which included seeing the French crown jewels in the Apollo Gallery, and some medieval masterpieces, we entered the Grand Gallery. This gallery contains works from the Italian Renaissance, and it is off of this gallery that the Mona Lisa is displayed. We werenall so glad that Emma woke up by that point. We were anxious to see how she would react. A few months ago, she was awake when the beginning of “The Da Vinci Code” was on TV. The murder takes place in the Grand Gallery, and one of the clues is written across the Mona Lisa. Since then, she has associated her face with something scary and foreboding. For a while she was really freaked out by it. We couldn’t resist teasing her how we were going to see the real Mona Lisa when we were in Paris, but we actually were helping desensitize her to it. When we passed copies of it for sale on the streets of Paris, she would just scream for a comic effect. Her reaction to the real painting was the same that many tourists seem to have-- she was under-whelmed by it. Actually, we’ve read and heard about how so many people are surprised at how small it is, that we were actually surprised at how large it is. We had come to expect something the size of a postage stamp. It is behind glass, which causes a bit of a glare, and one is tempted to just check her off the list of required sites, but Rick Steves’s commentary coaxes a little more from her. “Mona doesn’t knock your socks off,” he says, “but she winks at the patient viewer.”

We worked our way through other Italian masterpieces, and into the French wing. Then we called it a day. In less than two hours, we had gone to many of the stops on the highlights tour, but even then, we got lost on some and skipped others, while noticing a few gems on our own along the way. That’s the Louvre for you. That’s Europe for us.

We had a long way to go back to the hotel, and we had done a lot of walking. Scott’s feet in particular were causing problems, and he had a hard time keeping up with the others as we crossed the roads. We found our way back to the Metro, made our transfer to the trains and back to the suburbs where our tiny closet of a hotel room is. We had Kentucky Fried Chicken along the way. Yes, on our first day in Paris, we ate McDonald’s, Subway, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. It may be Scott’s way of avoiding eating snails like the girls expect him to.