I've now had a long sleep and two meals scrounged from whatever was left in the fridge, which had been mostly purged to prevent it from holding a violent bacterial revolution over the last two weeks of inattention. I'm starting to quickly fall back into the comfortable normalcy of home, so some of the details of this entry will unfortunately be reconstructed through the haze of time and sleep deprivation. I hope, however, it provides a capstone to the entries. Thank you for reading!
Friday, as predicted, was full and long. We started with breakfast at the hostel, which offered several kinds of programmable, dispensed hot drinks, one kind of juice, and three kinds of bread. This didn't feel entirely like a full "breakfast" to some of our students, but certainly provided some complex carbohydrates to help power through the required day ahead.
Our first stop was the Louvre, which we wanted to get to early before it filled up with visitors. Our guided tour started at 9:15, and when we got there, a mall's worth of tourists and citizens had already gathered in the gates and the main rotunda. By the time we left at 11:00, the line for admission stretched an almost unimaginable distance back, and the main halls around the most famous works of art — the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and the Mona Lisa, mais bien sur — were solidly packed with a dense clump of onlookers.
Our guide began by telling us how long it would take to look at every item in the museum. Contrary to some articles published on the internet, she told us that if a person spent a mere two and a half seconds in front of every exhibited piece, it would take three years... if this person spent twenty-four hours a day doing so. Jaws dropped. Similar levels of astonishment were expressed when she talked about the history of the construction of the overall building, which was done hodgepodge over centuries, and which resulted in the possibility of walking from one end to the other and ending up on a different floor than one started on, without ever using stairs or ramps. It's a real House of Leaves situation in there.
The Louvre is specifically an ancient art and antiquities museum, with strong collections of pre-Raphaelite and Renaissance paintings, in addition to the ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sculpture and artifact collections. We were treated to rooms of antique furniture, views of royal jewels, and notes on this history of Roman copies of Greek sculpture, and the differences in royal iconography in pre- and post-renaissance Biblical scenes.
We looked at a lot of things...
...including when, along with seemingly everyone else in the world, we crowded in a room to look at the Mona Lisa and tried, absurdly, to take a photograph of perhaps the world's most famous painting. This is an act made more difficult by the other people in the room and the fact that it's kept behind both an additional sheet of plexiglass and a guarded, patrolled gap to keep onlookers and potential vandals at a distance. Still, with a good zoom lens, we were able to get a look at the old familiar lady. Afterward, we were told that about twice a month, someone becomes so enraptured with the Mona Lisa's smile, that he disrobes and presents himself to her in order to get her to love him back. No, really.
Of course, it's become a classic thing to take pictures in the same pose as statues and paintings, and we were not inured to the tradition.
After the museum, we enjoyed the cool, fresh air in the courtyard and took a breather outside at the famous glass pyramid before moving on to the next location.
Our next stop was the eleventh-century Sainte Chapelle. Because of the recent fire in Notre Dame de Paris, our schedule had been altered, and we would be unable to follow on there directly. The Chapelle was centuries older than the cathedrals we'd previously visited, and the statues and iconography were strikingly different. As were the three walls of blue stained glass windows, which created an amazing spectacle. We then walked a few blocks to peer over barriers and past police guards at the scaffolding and cranes erected to repair the Notre Dame roof and "forest" of thirteenth-century timber that had been lost.
We had lunch around Place St. Michel before heading to the Champ de Mars at the base of the Eiffel Tower, where we wandered around and fended off various semi-legal vendors of mini Tour Eiffels, laser pointers, and assorted evening party helpers.
We took a boat up and down the Seine, sitting on benches on the top, just skirting under some of the many bridges that cross the waterway; an ideal way to see some of the city's architecture... when it doesn't start to pour. Which — because if there's a consistent thread in these entries, it's that the weather was nothing if not wildly inconsistent — it decided to do for a little more than half of the boat ride, sending us running for cover on the lower decks, and watching the more muted scenery amongst the other huddled tourists.
And then to dinner at a crèperie that served us both savory and dessert crèpes. Unlike the previous dinner, which was the same for all concerned, so as to make things easier on the kitchen, this establishment allowed each person to order their own choice, which then generated a little confusion as dishes were brought and suddenly whisked away to other tables, and mild language and pronunciation confusion created a couple of mis-orders. Some of the extra meals were gladly consumed by some of our hungry team, and I'm sure they would have wolfed down even more if our kindly Punk Amélie-stylee waitress had offered us more mistakes.
We arrived back at the Eiffel tower just at sunset. Where the tower had seemed a strange brown-ish color against bright blue skies, it now glowed golden under the lights and against the darkening sky. We got our tickets and went through two security checks to get in line to crowd up the elevator to the second platform, to then break into smaller, more chaotic groups to head to the topmost stage. There we jostled for space against the wire fence to peer down at the city and try and figure out, for example: which intersection was near the Arc de Triomphe, and was that the Cathédrale or the Bascilica, or something else altogether? After two days of rushing around, how well did we know the city we'd been criss-crossing?
After fighting for space to snap some pictures and maybe FaceTime the view with some boon companions back home, some of us got tired of additionally fighting with acrophobia on the platforms, claustrophobia in the elevators, agoraphobia in the crowds, and fighting simple fatigue after a fourteen hour day. We took combinations of elevators and stairs back down to solid ground. As we left the gates, we walked a way off and then paused for about four minutes until 11PM, at which point a series of strobe lights — which we had seen while on the platform, but which hadn't seemed to have any purpose — lit up the tower in a series of sparkles. We all grabbed our cameras and recorded it, and then watched it with out own eyes, realizing the vividity of the moment just wasn't being captured on digital film. However, just to approximate, it looked something like this, only much, much more:
And then back to the hostel by just around midnight. And then: up in the morning, some last-minute dispensing of Euros dans un petit supermarché while clogging up the lobby with all of our assorted suitcases, then hauling them through momentary drizzle to the bus. Which brings us, full circle to the opening paragraph, and round trip back to New Hampshire. Let's do it again in two years; I might have caught up on sleep by that point.
PS: There are lots of Beatles songs about driving and travel, but the title was the one that ran in circles 'round my head as I clutched my passport and boarding pass in the Charles de Gaulle airport.
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