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| Outside of our flat, heading out for day 2! |
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| beautiful wall with purple flowers growing out of it, photo credit Charlotte |
The day started off with a quest for pain au chocolat, as all of our mornings in France will begin. Luckily there is a bakery on every street corner which is only a tiny exaggeration. We ended up in Place de Tertre, which is tourist central. It used to be a thriving artists market where artists would set up their art and also draw en plein air. They still do that, but now it feels a lot more like you're in Disney World. I mean, it feels a LOT like Disney. The menus are in French, but also in English. The employees are very nice, and speak English. There's a Starbucks. All it was missing was a character visit. But as anyone whose been to Disney knows, saying something is like being in Disney isn't really a bad thing. It was beautiful.
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| Pain au chocolat obtained! |
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| walking to Sacre Couer |
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| Place du Tertre, as the artists set up. |
From there we walked (uphill) to Sacre Couer, which is a Romanesque basilica. Most of the churches in Paris are gothic (think Notre Dame) and pointy. Sacre Couer has a dome. The views from the plaza outside of Sacre Couer were gorgeous. There was also a lovely wall of locks that we enjoyed looking at.
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| Sacre Couer from outside, photo credit Charlotte |
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| Sacre Couer |
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| photo by Charlotte |
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| Photo by Charlotte |
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| When your love doesn't yet merit a lock, but is more on trash bag tied around the fence level. |
Sacre Couer was exceptionally beautiful inside. One thing that struck me, though, was the commercialization. I haven't toured European churches in 7 years, but I don't recall ever seeing one of those "put in a penny, pay us a dollar and this machine will give you a flattened penny with Sacre Couer on it!" until yesterday. They also had a gift shop inside, which I think Notre Dame might have had too? I can't recall from that long ago. It just seems counter to the grandiosity and sacredness of the space.
Montmartre means the mountain of martyrs, so this area has been a place for worship since the dawn of civilization here. But Sacre Couer was built in the end of the 1800s and opened in 1914. So it is likely the newest church we will see during our time here. It is the highest part of Paris, so the views are spectacular even without climbing the dome.
But, we wanted to climb the dome.
So we climbed up 300 stairs of varying height and depth, about 250 of which were in a very narrow corkscrew that I am still dizzy from. The view from the top was as spectacular as promised, though. And then in an attempt to un-wind my dizzy head, we did the reverse to get back down (did not work to resolve dizziness!)
After Sacre Couer, we walked back to the house passing this awesome statue of Salvador Dali. Dali happens to be one of the favorite artists of 3 members of our traveling party (me included!) and Montmartre has a museum which holds the most Dali pieces in France. The largest collection of Dali works outside of Europe is in my home town of Tampa and I loved going there in high school.
Melissa and frogs are not usually things that are photographed together, so we took this opportunity to capture this image (grenouille is frog in French)
In the afternoon we took a grand adventure to the walled medieval city of Provins, which took us about 2 hrs to get to via metro and suburban SNCF train. Provins used to be the 3rd biggest city in France in the middle ages with 80,000 people in the walled city. It is also famous for cultivating the red rose. We went there because on top of all of these accolades, it holds the largest medieval festival in France.
The train ride was filled with card games for the kids and dirty looks from the couple sitting behind us. After double checking we hadn't mistakenly sat in the quiet car, we let them carry on (just a little bit more quietly).
Once we arrived in Provins, we walked about 15 mins through the non-walled streets to the festival. Along the way we saw some really old houses - it looks like the ceilings of the first floors inside these houses must actually be in a U shape!
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| This is a very very mild version of a sloping support in a very old house. |
The festival itself was full of street performers, artisans, and food. And far more people than could fit in the narrow windy streets. Some of the street performers were straight up scary looking! You could also outfit the entire cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail from the artisan booths, which this family found pretty amazing.
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| these guys were super talented, but way too freaky to look directly at. |
We found a castle from which we could re-enact the scene from Monty Python where they yell "Fetchez la vache!" which might have been my favorite part of the day.
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| Fetchez la vache! Come back here and I shall taunt you a second time! |
After we were all peopled out, we headed back on the train where inexplicably the same judgey couple chose to sit behind us again, and therefore we assumed they were coming to the nuisance and we were absolved of all liability.
By the time we got back to Montmartre it was 7:45 and I was starving, and probably hangry. 300 stairs and 1000 steps later we found a suitable restaurant (requirements: served steak frites, did not cost one entire paycheck) was located and we had a lovely dinner where for some reason on the tv they were playing mens rugby and not women's soccer. We made it back to the flat in time for most of the first half of the Canada/New Zealand game and plotted our general timeline for today when we'll go re-enact our Eiffel Tower pictures from 7 yrs ago, see where Doug used to live here, then party like the insane American Outlaws we are prior to going to USA vs. Chile.
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