My darling sister Kaelah is going to Europe between graduate school semesters, and she invites me to come with her. I haven't banked many vacation days at work, but this year I'm trying to say yes to more things. And anyway, it's not hard to say yes when the question is "Do you want to go to France and Italy for a few days with one of your favorite people?"
I fly out of Boston Monday night, and arrive in Paris after 10am Tuesday. Kaelah meets me at the airport, and we take an Uber to our AirBnB near Notre-Dame. I've learned a few words and phrases through Duolingo, so I know just enough to apologize for not knowing the language at all. Fortunately for me, Kae is fluent. She chats charmingly with our driver, who is listening to a radio station playing some combination of 80s/90s American easy listening and French music. It makes me motion sick, but I can't stop craning my neck to look at all the old buildings pressed close to the edge of the street. Baroque, neoclassic, and art deco jumble each other next to a few boring more modern facades. Our place is a tiny efficiency apartment, with a gorgeous view of rooftops and a courtyard below. The building's elevator is a modern addition, as wide as my shoulders and only two people deep. We fit by stacking our luggage between us.
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| Paris and Genova both were wonderfully dog friendly, though many dog owners were decidedly unfriendly. In the US, it seems dog owners and dog lovers have an understanding- you compliment dogs when you see them on the street, and the owner is delighted by the attention. Cooing over a person's dog in Paris and Genova got me blank stares, or scolding from owners worried I would try to pet them. |
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| The view from our windows of the nearby rooftops. I used the HUJI app to take a lot of these photos, which is a virtual disposable camera and produces light leaks, film grain, and other imperfections in photographs. |
We leave our apartment to walk around the city. The Fontaine Saint-Michel is steps away from our door: it was built around 1860 and depicts the angel Michael defeating Lucifer. It's been recently graffitied on several sides by the street artist Invader (or by an artist copying his style. Invader is a modern urban- or street-artist who draws a lot of inspiration from the heavily pixelated 8-bit videogames of the 80s and 90s. He's known for placing small tile mosaics in urban places. If you haven't seen it, check out the fascinating documentary, or perhaps in-joke art project, called Exit Through The Gift Shop.)
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| Archangel Michael, the Devil, and a man with poor taste in hats |
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| An Invader mosaic |
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| The Seine, with Nortre-Dame in the background |
We walk through crowds, and Kae helpfully takes a photo of some tourists at their request. It's noisy, the packed throng of cars and people block out any sound of the river nearby. It smells strongly of piss on many streets. Vendors line the walkways on either side of the Seine, selling postcards and prints. I buy five postcards that would never make it through the American mail system - vintage pornographic photos of women in their bloomers and ladies being spanked. I buy much tamer postcards with Toulouse-Lautrec prints to send to family. A street beggar has a small dog, and I want to toss him a few coins but don't. Half a block away, another beggar has two small dogs, and I think that maybe this will go on forever. Maybe I'll keep walking, and each successive panhandler will add another dog to their cadre, and I'll have to decide if this is enough to make me hand over a couple euros.
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| Notre-Dame, with a light leak from the HUJI app |
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| Relief carvings over the entrance |
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| A side entrance of Notre-Dame |
We approach the beautiful Notre-Dame across an expansive courtyard. It's nice that the cathedral is set back from the road, and with some space on either side. You need the negative space around it to be able to take in the details. It's even more beautifully ornate than photos do justice. Like a gothic wedding cake, tiers of dark adornment rise high above the ground. At a glance, Notre-Dame is structurally symmetrical, but up close I see that the carvings are unique to each side. Little scenes and tableaus appear: on one side, medieval-looking animals crowd around a man; on the other, a saint holds his own head.
There's a long line winding out the front door to enter, so we decide to find Kae's favorite Parisian gelato shop first and come back later, hoping the crowd will have died down. We cross a bridge to the cafe, and it looks just how I'd dreamed a French cafe would look. Little bistro tables sit on the wide sidewalk, and couples drink coffee and smoke cigarette after cigarette. The ice cream is sold from a small freezer outside, and Kae translates the French names of flavors for me. My favorite word on the menu board is pamplemousse (grapefruit), but my favorite flavor is the chocolate. We sit on a low wall high above the Seine and eat while talking. The water is a cloudy green. A black dog walks along the lane, down the stone steps behind us, and waits awhile at the bottom of the stairs. He walks on without being joined by a master. I tell Kae about the two dogs in Iceland that guided me up Helgafell.
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| We ate gelato at least once a day on this trip |
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| Another Invader installation |
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| A dapper older gentleman and his bike |
We walk back to Notre-Dame, and the line has tripled in size. It snakes up and down, but it's moving quickly so we join the end. I shouldn't be surprised, since the cathedral sees about 30,000 visitors each day. There is a group of small children running around who all have their faces painted grey.
Building of the cathedral began in 1163, and was completed in the 1240s. The wood framing alone took 1,300 oak trees, and much of the stone was taken from local houses the bishop ordered destroyed for materials. In the millennia since, Our Lady of Paris has been pillaged and protected, ransacked and renovated. As of 2013, a hive bees lives on the roof of the sacristy.
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| Gargoyle and chimera waterspouts |
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| Notre-Dame was one of the first buildings to use flying buttresses. Its original architectural plans didn't include them, but as the walls grew taller and thinner, buttresses were needed to support them. |
It's dark and cool inside, but much noisier than I expected. I'm used to tourists treating even destination churches like sanctuaries. Here, people talk loudly to one another in several languages. A woman blocks an already choked aisle by using a selfie-stick. I'm bumped into repeatedly, and we pull our purses to lay in front of us to discourage pickpockets. We each pay a small donation to light a candle. I'm not Catholic or even Christian, but I have a connection to Mary. I light a long match, transfer the flame to a votive, and watch the smoke rise up with my prayer.
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| Incredibly detailed stained glass. I didn't realize the panels could be opened. |
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The rose window in the north transept.
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| Joan of Arc. Joan was beatified in 1909 in the cathedral. |
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| You could donate 5 euros to light one of these candles. I really wanted to donate 10 and just keep the candle, but god was watching me. |
We planned to visit the famous Catacombs of Paris, but they are closed due to a worker's strike. Instead, Kaelah and I decide to go to a cemetery, and she reserves us an Uber. We wait at the pickup location, but don't see the driver. He calls Kaelah's phone, and asks us where we are. He gives us directions to where he's parked, but while we're walking toward him, he hangs up on Kaelah and then cancels our ride request. When she reserves another Uber, we get the same driver.
Driving in Paris is a terrifying experience. Few roads have painted stripes to define lanes; and when they do, the lines are ignored anyway. Drivers change lanes seemingly at random, trying to shave off a few seconds by darting around other cars. Most of the cars are manual transmission, and vehicles stop so close to one another that this becomes a real problem on hills. To add to the bedlam, motorcycles and scooters zip in and out of traffic, lane-splitting and tailgating with wild abandon. It's like someone took the worst parts of Boston drivers' lawlessness and the speed/abundance of LA drivers, and mixed both with a good helping of general assholery. My fear is only outweighed by the huge relief of not being in the driver's seat.
Our driver drops us near Montmartre Cemetery Along the short walk to find the entrance, we pass fruit stands, more street art, and many happy dogs.
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| Gorgeous street art and pedestrian |
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| Kaelah pointed out a Banksy! |
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| A row of garage doors in an alley were all painted with classic French posters |
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| A good boy with his people |
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| A good boy on his own |
Montmarte is a relatively new burying ground - it opened in 1825 after Paris' city limits had been exhausted of sanitary space for disposing the dead. It's a dense labyrinth of graves and mausoleums, some of which now rest snugly under an overpass for Rue Caulaincourt. Many of the dead are famous artists: musicians, actors, writers, philosophers, painters. Before it was the final resting place for these residents, Montmarte was an abandoned gypsum quarry, and used as a mass grave during the French Revolution.
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| A small section of the cemetery is under this bridge |
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| A mausoleum roof right up against the girders for the bridge above |
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| "To our friend" |
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| Close ups with my fancy camera lens |
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| Most mausoleums were in some state of disrepair. When I saw this statue out of the corner of my eye I almost yelped. |
Other parts of the cemetery sprawl out on various levels of tree-crowded grounds. More monuments and mausoleums stand shoulder-to-shoulder with smaller gravestones and above-ground tombs.
But apart from the unique location and famous names, what Montmarte is really know for is its cats. At some point in its history, a small colony of feral cats made Montmarte their home. Now dozens of them roam the grounds, sunning themselves on graves and stalking mice in the grass. Kaelah and I watched as one tried to wedge itself under an ajar tomb cover to get into the crypt below.
We leave the poets and the cats to find some dinner. We walk past the Moulin Rouge and the Quartier Pigalle - Paris' redlight district. It's still daytime, so we don't have to worry about barkers and pimps, although we are wary of pickpockets. A couple approaches us and says "You speak English? Can you help?" They have a map and appear to be asking for directions, but something pricks Kaelah's Spidey-sense. Instead of helping, Kae acts confused and says "No?" while apologizing in French. I take my cue from her and smile bemusedly at the couple as though I don't understand either, and we walk away from them. If they're legitimate tourists, they're steps away from newsstands and vendors to seek directions from. But it's possible they're the distraction arm of a pickpocket team, and since thieves and scammers are rampant in the redlight district, it's smart to be wary.
We make our way up a long hill to a neighborhood in search of food. We pass street art on almost every business wall. (It's a fine line between "street art" and "graffiti" to be sure, but if it took skill and beautifies a space, I'll call it art.) A yarn bomber has decorated a row of barricade poles and they look like funny little muppet creatures. On the ground, someone has stenciled a white cat with the words "Follow the cat!", and we do for several blocks. The trail keeps leading on without arriving at anything, so we tell the cat stencil to fuck off and search for food instead.
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| Pointless endeavor right here |
I am not a good eater. By that I mean that I don't like a lot of foods. I find a lot of flavors to be too acidic or just gross, and some textures activate my gag reflex. I don't like it when too many ingredients all touch together. (Like casserole. Casserole is what you do when you don't like any of the foods you have enough to eat by themselves, so you mix them all together in a big pot of mediocrity.) I'm nervous to try French cuisine, since although I know the foods themselves will be wonderfully prepared, that doesn't mean I'll like them. We stop at a cafe Kae knows, and I get a spinach salad with tuna and tomatoes and croutons and some other vegetables. After I pick out the tomatoes and swap my weird brown seed bread for Kae's white bread, it's quite delicious.
I'm surprised that water doesn't come with a meal- you have to specifically order it. It comes by the bottle, and costs more than a soda back home. You can get two kinds of bottled water - gas and naturalle - and I solidify the knowledge that I hate carbonated water. (Truly, it's a pointless beverage. The best that carbonated water can hope to taste like is when a fast food Coke dispenser runs out of the syrup and you're left with only the seltzer. And that's not a compliment. It's like how the best part of a cucumber tastes like the worst part of a watermelon. Either way, you eat the meh part of a thing.)
We meander home. Tomorrow we have an early day, and anyway the 7 miles of walking and long plane rides are catching up to us.
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| A pretty spot up the hill from the cafe |
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| Kae indulges my shoe shots |
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| This store was a self-styled cabinet of curiosities. I wanted to buy the French cryptozoology postcards, but at 5 euros each, I couldn't justify it. |
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| I held my hand out for this dog to sniff as we walked by, and a lady in the shop shouted "No, no no!" at me. |
