I'm not good at thinking chronologically, so this is going to jump around a bit, sorry...
On Wednesday, I talked with the academic advisor-type lady here about how to take the classes I want without doing some of the work that I don't want to do, and as a result I am now enrolled in a 1-unit lecture series. This, as it turns out, is a wonderful solution. Basically, this means that I now have a 60 euro budget for the quarter to spend acquiring Paris-related knowledge, provided I take notes every time. As part of this, I went with one of the Stanford classes to the Musée du Moyen Age on Thursday and then to Notre-Dame de Chartres on Saturday.
Unfortunately I did not get to spend a lot of time at the Musée du Moyen Age because I had class right afterwards, but I did get to see La Dame à la Licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn). It's this really stunning series of six tapestries. The colors are incredibly vibrant, and the images are so detailed and expressive. Very cool.
I also took Snow White-inspired pictures outside the Musée du Moyen Age. It's located in an authentic medieval building, complete with its own well. I like the way the picture turned out.
Notre-Dame de Chartres is a cathedral built during the 12th century located in the town of Chartres about an hour south of Paris. Like Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral is huge and awe-inspiring. They keep the electric lighting to a minimum inside the cathedral so it's mostly natural light coming in throug the stained glass windows which is closer to how the church would have originally been. The effect is eery, and makes for difficult photography, but the stained glass windows are impressive.
We also got to explore the crypt there. Apparently the current Gothic cathedral was built by expanding upon an earlier Roman cathedral that was built on the foundations of a Gaul church. In the crypt, they uncovered foundations of the original church built sometime around the 800s. Very cool.
The church at Chartres also has a priests' area in the middle, with the doors that the priests put in back in the day to allow them to get in and out. Those priests were short!
My other very Parisian adventure of the week was also on Thursday. I was shopping for socks with some of the other Stanford girls (very exciting, I know) when one of them said she had to leave because she was going to check out a choir rehearsal. This made me very excited, so I followed her. She knew very little about what it was we were going to, and I knew even less. The directions she had ended up leading us to the Sorbonne, where we had to prove we were students in Paris at the Sorbonne for a legit reason to get through the doors. The Sorbonne is gorgeous, though! I really wanted to whip out my camera, but after the hassle we went through with security I figured this might not be the best move. So in we went to the rehearsal hall, which was equally beautiful. When we showed up, the director had us sign our names to these pieces of paper without explaining what it was we were agreeing to, and about halfway through the rehearsal we figured out that we'd somehow just enrolled in a class at the Sorbonne that runs through the middle of January, and we both leave the country at the beginning of December. Oops! It was a lot of fun to sing again, though, and I was very excited to see the Sorbonne.
Last night I managed to find my Isolated Giant again. It turns out the statue is actually called The Giant Isore, not Isolé, but I have decided to rechristen him. I prefer my name for him - it seems more appropriate. Right near that intersection, I also found this gem:
From left to right, those storefronts read: "Picard: Frozen goods" "Protestant Church" and "Shopping Avenue" Oh Paris.But the most exciting part of the week was that on Friday I had the stomach flu. It was not a lot of fun, but it was definitely an experience...
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