Paris

Notre Dame de Paris

On September 9, we switched locations to Paris where we were hosted by the Holy Cross community there.  After settling in and having a quick look at the Holy Cross school, St. Michel de Picpus, we went downtown Paris.  I had never toured a city quite like Paris before, with so much to see (and so many other people wanting to see it as well).  The first thing we visited was the famous Notre Dame cathedral, which now stands as the most impressive Gothic building I've been in to date.  Afterwards, we visited Saint Sulpice, a church in a more Renaissance style, but equally impressive.  Together those churches are the two biggest in Paris.  After walking around a beautiful, expansive, and very old garden in central Paris, we took the Metro out the the Eiffel tower.  For being a structure created with no practical purpose, it was really quite cool.  We paid the 3.70 Euro to climb to the second level, which afforded us with a great view of Paris.  Notably, I was able to spot Notre Dame Cathedral and what we later found out was the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur.

French Garden

The next day, Saturday, we made good progress on Paris sightseeing.  First we went to the Basilica of Saint Denis, which was the first Gothic church ever build.  Then we went to Sacre-Coeur, a beautiful Renaissance style church, complete with a dome and situated on a mountain of sorts.  There was caught the morning Mass and midday prayer, before walking around the interior.  After seeing our churches for the day, we took the metro to see the Arc de Triomphe, as massive arch situated in the middle of a huge traffic circle.  The arch was commissioned by Napolean and Wikipedia tells me that it is 50 meters (164 feet) tall.  However, most of our sightseeing for the day was taking up the famous Louvre museum.  In the museum is really an embarrassment of riches.  I had never seen so many painting, sculptures, and artifacts in the whole rest of my life.  Just imagine walking down a long hall, the walls absolutely covered beautiful paintings, and you have some idea of one wing on one floor of the museum.  It was impossible to spend any time at all with most of the art, except in walking by it.  Yet each piece deserved contemplation and could have been the jewel of any small collection.  The most famous piece in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa, but after seeing it I kind of wonder what all the fuss is about...

Basilique du Sacre-Coeur



Sunday, September 11, we left France and flew over the English Channel and into London.  After waiting two hours in the immigration line, buying an Oyster card, taking the Tube, walking about aimlessly, and taking a cab, we arrived at our home for the next four months.

I suppose at this point, it would make sense to say a few general things about France:

1.  Awesome food.  Lunch and dinner were almost always three courses.  Notable food items included a prevalence of raw tomatoes, seafood, cheese, and grapes.  However, the absolute staple of the French diet was bread and wine.  No meal was without bread, and, excluding breakfast, only one or two were without wine.  This was even true at the monastery.  I think having so much bread and wine really helped me to better understand the Eucharist and the power of that particular symbol.  The only downside foodwise was that the breakfasts were not particularly big. (The French phrase for breakfast is 'petit dejeuner.'  It's a bad sign when the name of the meal itself includes the word small.)  But having toast and jam for breakfast was great, and the small size of the meal was more than made up for by the other two.  I don't think I would even have wanted a large breakfast.

2. I really enjoyed simply driving between French towns, taking in the verdant and rolling hills of the French countryside.  Also the streets of the towns often looked like something I had experienced once in a storybook, but had now come to life.  It had a historical and cozy feel that is difficult to describe.



A painting in the Louvre of a hall of paintings in the Louvre



3. Being in Europe in the days leading up to the tenth anniversary of September 11, it was interesting to see what a big deal that event was for them.  9/11 was brought up many times in conversation with us, I suppose in good part because we were American.  Perhaps part of the reason for the event's continued significance lies in the prevalence of multiculturalism as an issue in European culture today.

4. In Notre Dame Cathedral, I had this reflection about these great churches.  While they are engineering marvels to be sure, far ahead of their time, I still found myself disappointed in them. I guess I am speaking here of Notre Dame in particular.  Notre Dame didn't flood my soul with aesthetic pleasure, it didn't make me perfectly happy, it didn't give me a mystical experience.  The tallest church in the world was still too small.  When we humans built Notre Dame de Paris, we gave God the biggest, the most beautiful thing we could.  We put years of effort, tons of stone, millions of dollars, and whole lifetimes of men into the effort.  We did as much as we possibly could to pay off an infinite debt of gratitude.  Yet, our offering is still incomprehensibly small, and God so incomprehensibly large.

Cheese and grapes just prior to being eaten



5.  You really do need to speak a language other than English if you want to get by in non-English speaking parts of the world.  That may be changing as generations of school children grow up learning English as a second language, but without hosts who knew English I don't think we could have made it on our own.  (Paris might be an exception to this.) However, by the end of my stay in France I had learned to say (functionally speaking) "please," "thank you very much," "you're welcome," "I don't speak French," how to order something in a restaurant (kind of), and how to buy a stamp to mail a post card to the US (which I did do by myself, thank you very much).  By the end, I was even able to get the basic idea when reading a sign and even occasionally figure out the topic of a conversation between two French speakers.

After experiencing a language barrier myself, I have much more empathy for, say, native Spanish speakers living in the States, and sympathize much less with people and politicians who have an "English language only" mentality.

Bottom line: France was a pretty cool place, and I kind of want to learn French