Now I Know What Sumptuous Means

I thought that Sainte-Chapelle looked promising in the guidebook but I wasn't really prepared for what was awaiting me. From our hotel in Les Halles we walked over to the Isle de la Cite, and when we spotted the long line for admission Tenzig tried to back out. I think I may have threatened him at that point, so we ended up joining the line somewhat sulkily (on both our parts). In line it really doesn't look like you are headed anywhere special, from the street you are herded into the courtyard of an old but nondescript building, the line then snakes around to the front of a small church-like building with a dingy facade, then you fork over some Euros (ouch!) and you are in. You enter through the lower chapel, a room with low vaulted ceilings, decorated in gold, red and blue. A few small stained glass windows, sprinkled among the niches formed by the ribs of the vaults, allow a little light to seep into the room. It's actually a very pretty room but it basically gets wiped from your mind once you ascend the spiral stair and see...


I suppose we were very lucky because we had a nice sunny day, but I think Saint-Chapelle would be fabulous even on the rainiest day. The light streaming through the colored glass was sparkling and glorious. The walls of glass are held up by the thinnest threads of columns, each one painted with the most delicate detail. The scenes depicted in the glass are biblical ones, but I felt awash in visual information and all I saw were jewels of light falling down on me. All of a sudden you really start feeling for the peasants stuck down in the lower chapel. Then, just as quickly, you look at the candy colored panes and forget them.


The breath-taking sights don't stop with the glass and the columns. When you are in the Upper Chapel, you are completely wrapped in luxurious details, even every inch of the floor beneath your feet is covered with tracery and design.


I think that I rate Saint-Chapel up there with the Sistine Chapel, as a sight that you just can't get enough of. By the time you leave your neck is sore from looking up and your eyes can't drink in anymore, but you don't want to stop. I wish that I could have lain down on the floor in a pool of light, with no one else around. As more people arrived, and people like me put-off leaving, the room began to get crowded. Tenzig pulled me away and we went back down the spiral staircase. Once outside, I looked more carefully at the outside of the building. I saw the flying buttresses that were holding up the curtains of glass. And even farther up I saw this guy, telling me not to go...

Back in the Saddle!

Okay, I have been very delinquent about writing and I feel very guilty about it. I got thrown off my game but now I am back. Enough said! Now I want to continue from where I left off: hot chocolate. We drank ours in a patch of sun at the bottom of the Rue des Martyrs while visions of quiches were still dancing in my head. We had no set plan, except to head back to the hotel so we decided to continue downhill in that general direction. On the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, sunlight glinting through a glass ceiling caught my eye, and I think I actually squeeked as I pointed out the Passages Couverts to Tenzig. I had actually crossed them off the list as something we wouldn't have time to see, but now here they were! It was meant to be. The Passages Couvert are covered arcades meandering in between buildings, lined with curious little shops. Stepping into the passage I felt transported back in time a hundred years. There was a peacefulness in the air and I loved looking in the shop windows. My favorite was a bookseller, the window was full of volumes with magical gold inlaid covers.




We stopped for lunch across from the bookseller, the food didn't blow me away but I was so happy with my surroundings that I barely noticed. Tenzig ate something strange, some kind of hotdog with a side of fries, mostly I was satisfied with a glass of wine and the quality of the light.


Farther along the passage there are stamp collectors, antiques dealers, and of the always necessary giant moose head shop!


When we came out the other end, back into the regular day, I was sad to leave the passages behind. We talked about coming back before we left, but we didn't get the chance. Next time I will make sure I got to spend more time wandering from window to window, discovering the marvels within.

Chocolat Chaud at the End of the Rainbow

One day Tenzig told me he needed new guitar strings so we had to go to Pigalle, a neighborhood up the hill from the Marais, known for its music stores and even more for its strip clubs and seedy characters. The area is featured in the film Paris Je T'aime, in the segment called "Pigalle" with Bob Hoskins and Fanny Forestier. That movie highlights the low-down night-time characteristics but what I encountered during the day was very different. I have to admit I wasn't thrilled about the idea of going on an errand, after all I was on vacation and in Paris, at most I should have been shopping or deciding between two types of meringues for desert. After some cajoling I gritted my teeth and agreed to the trip to Pigalle, and then, once I was there ... I found my favorite favorite favorite street in all of Paris! Before I left for Paris I polled various friends on their favorite Parisian spots and one friend and kindred traveler sent me an article about the Rue des Martyrs. Once I realized I had a chance to hijack the outing (once the guitar strings had been gotten out of the way), my attitude changed completely. Tenzig was skeptical but I was vindicated when the Rue des Martyrs turned out to be a street of wonders, lined with tasty treats from top to bottom.


We passed pastry shops with windows laden with mini-quiches, the kind you dream about here in New York and then settle for Balthazar or something else knowing that it is second best. You tell yourself it's good enough but when you are reminded of the real thing you can't go back. Cheese shops put forth delectable hockey pucks in 50 varieties, their pungent smells wafting down the block to the fishmonger in his apron filleting fish while shrimp and scallops lounged on beds of ice. A few more steps brought us to sellers of fruits and vegetables where the boundaries between varieties have no meanings. The chanterelles mushrooms burst with buttery color, holding their own against ripe, succulent grapes.


When we started our walk we were at the top of the hill, having exited the Metro at the Pigalle station, and so our progress along Rue des Martyrs was downhill. When we reached the bottom, at Rue Lamartine, we needed a rest and refreshment so we parked ourselves at a table on the sun drenched sidewalk and indulged in some warm and delicious Cafe au Lait and Chocolat Chaud.

Dem Bones

I had a lot of plans when I was preparing for Paris but sometimes the coolest things are the ones that aren't planned. One of Tenzig's colleagues from the show mentioned that he wanted to go see the Paris catacombs and invited us along. Death rituals have never scared me and ever since I was a kid I have had a fascination with looking at piles of bones (some good bone piles of my youth: Toraja (Indonesia), Capuchin Catacombs (Sicily)). I wasn't sure what to expect from the catacombs in Paris but I was ready to find out. We hopped on the Metro at Chatelet and made our way to Denfert-Rochereau across the river in the 14th Arrondissement. The entrance is a little hard to find and only marked by a small sign. The fee is only 7 euros and it's pretty low key inside, after going down a stone spiral staircase you arrive unceremoniously in the tunnels lined with piles and piles and piles of bones.


Only a small section of the tunnels are open to the public (I guess people sneak into the restricted areas too though), and as we walked through I caught glimpses of blocked off tunnels branching away into murky blackness. The tunnels are dark and dank and initially a little creepy. The floors in parts are lumpy with tool marks and water drips from the ceiling as you duck though low doorways, I remember thinking that the arrangement of the bones was pretty utilitarian. At one time many of the bones had been moved en masse from a crypt in Les Halles, so efficient use of space seemed to be the primary concern. As we wandered around the corridors, I was looking for flourishes of creativity in the stacks, the kind found in Capuchin churches or saints' reliquaries, without much success. Taking pictures in the dimness made for a lot of blurry shots but one or two would make good album art for a death metal album. I think the most memorable thing about the catacombs is not the volume of bones but the tunnels themselves: a massive network carved out of the bedrock limestone of Paris, it's the kind of thing you dream about discovering as a kid.

Ou Est Mon Entourage?

As I have mentioned before, while I was in Paris I was reading Queen of Fashion, a biography of Marie Antoinette, and because of that I was driven to see some of the sites that featured prominently in her life. My favorite of these was the Palais Royal, a beautiful courtyard garden surrounded by an arcade that had housed the shop of Rose Bertin, MA's notorious dressmaker and personal stylist. MA would occasionally visit Bertin's shop to buy clothes, angering her royal relatives since the Palais Royal was also the stomping grounds of prostitutes and gamblers. Nowadays, the shops that ring the garden are pretty upscale clothing boutiques and antiques dealers, and there are no shady characters hanging about in the shadows. The gardens are a mix of wildflowers penned in by intensely manicured hedges. It's a nice quiet place to sit and read or stroll under trees that have been cut into box shapes (I was fascinated and perplexed by these trees, they look cool but square trees are just plain weird).


I visited Palais Royal by myself and I felt very relaxed and peaceful there. A couple of days later I dragged Tenzig and some friends there to see it but they didn't have the same intense reaction that I did, they we like "It's a garden." And I said "it's not just ANY garden," I tried to explain about Marie Antoinette and the calm feeling I got from the place but it seemed lost on them. We sat by the fountain for a while before we went to find some lunch, I was sad to leave it behind.

Why We Are Here

I went to Paris to relax but I owe the impetus for the trip to Tenzig who was there to work. He occasionally works with a theater company that participates in festivals all around the world and although I much prefer it when we go someplace just for the sake of going, sometimes I just can't resist tagging along. Traveling with someone who has to do a show every night can really put a kink in your dinner plans (you have to eat REALLY early or REALLY late), but it does come with the perk of a free hotel room. The company he works with is called the New York City Players, and as the name implies they are a New York City based group that is part of the vibrant down-town theater scene. In Paris they were scheduled to do a show at the Pompidou Center as part of the fall theater festival.


They got as far as installing the set before the whole thing was brought to a screeching halt: the security guards at the museum went on strike.


So the set was inside and the company was outside. On the first night they held out hope that the issue would be resolved and they could go on with the show but at seven thirty they officially canceled the performance and turned away the people who had gathered at the door. The same thing happened again the second night, and finally the director resolved to put on the show somewhere else so at least a few people could see it. In the end it was staged in a blank room in the lobby of the hotel that they set up to look as much like the set as possible.


Even in the improvised setting, the show was great and it was much appreciated by the 25 or so people who could fit in the room. I had been skeptical at first about putting the play on this way but in the end I liked it better since you really felt the intensity of the performance. It was a strange counterpoint to my sightseeing excursions to have this behind the scenes (literally!) struggle going on throughout the week.

Alter Ego

A word here about Tenzig. A few posts back I announced that I would use Tenzig Norgay as my boyfriend's nomme de guerre on my blog. I chose Tenzig Norgay since he was Edmund Hillary's climbing companion and the second person to ever set foot on the summit of Mount Everest. For a long time Hillary got all the glory but Tenzig definitely deserves his fair share, I hope my little tribute sends some glory his way. About his #2 status Tenzig said: "If it is a shame to be the second man on Mount Everest, then I will have to live with this shame." I say Everest is Everest. My Tenzig has to live with me dragging him around, although he has done plenty of traveling in his own right and when he goes places without me I fume with envy. By now he owes me a couple of big ones: Australia, Norway, Austria, Moscow, Venice... I will stop there before I get too worked up. As a traveling team we have well defined roles: I design elaborate walks and tours while he schemes how to get back to the hotel to relax. Somewhere in between we find a happy medium, eat good food and have a great time.