While You Were Sleeping...

Oops, I fell off the blog-wagon for a couple of weeks! Summer scheduling got in the way for a while but I am going to try to be more vigilant from now on... First things first, from now on my boyfriend will be known as Tenzig Norgay after the ultimate unsung travel companion, I am tired of trying to think of new interesting alternative ways of saying boyfriend. I also imagine that Tenzig was sometimes tired of carrying Edmund Hillary's crap all the way up Everest, and maybe he even wished he was home in bed instead of heading up to the roof of the world. After a long day of sightseeing and walking I know that my Tenzig is eager to get back to the hotel for a nap and some relaxation before dinner or whatever night-time plans we might have. It is fitting then that this post begins with a nap. After we got back from Notre Dame we finally got the keys to our hotel room and Tenzig declared it was nap-time. after a shower, to get rid of the rime of airplane scum still clinging to my hair and skin, I layed down with him. I couldn't sleep though. Our window opened onto the hotel courtyard and the air gently jostled the curtains and kept me from nodding off. I felt too excited to be in Paris, a place I had heard so much about but had never been to before. So, I got up and checked the guidebook, there was a church that looked pretty close-by the hotel so I went to take a look. I was delighted to find that close-by meant less than five minutes away (I didn't have a sense of what the scale of the city was yet, luckily the center is more like Rome in size rather than New York). The church was Saint-Eustache and it turned out to be my favorite church in Paris.


First of all, there was nobody there. No big crowds, the sweeping aisles were bathed in light with only a smattering of people wandering about. Second, it seems like it has been badly neglected and restoration has only recently gotten underway on both the inside and the ornate gothic exterior. Many of the vaults still show water damage and are blackened by centuries old soot. In some areas, the restoration is creeping in on the grime, backing it into a corner or a small chapel.


There are some famous people buried there: Moliere, Richelieu and the Madame de Pompadour and it has a beautiful organ and incredible carved wooden details. Light streaming in through the clerestory windows made the stone piers and vaults seem weightless, and made me aware of my own human scale. Most of all it really felt like a place of solitude and contemplation, undisturbed by crowds site seeing because they feel they have to.