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Monday, Aug. 07, 2006 - 3:09 p.m.

Pete & I took in Notre Dame yesterday, so I had quite a full day of walking and picture taking. Pete also updated his diary, so you fans of Pete might want to click the link over there on the left and go check it out. :) (Cannon, that would be you...why the hell haven't you dropped me email so I have your address, anyway?)

Note to the more dim among us: If you are in a creepy old house and the way to open a door down a creepy hallway is to put your fingers in the gaping maw of a creepy door knocker thingie, then trust me: you do not want to open that door that badly.

Why must I tell you people these things?

Where was I? Oh, right, Notre Dame. Which for some bizarre reason, I keep typing out as Notre Damn. I don't know why. Hopefully, God won't smite me for it. So, I took all kinds of pictures of the cathedral, most of which didn't really come out well. At least, of the color. Part of the problem was that I was trying to avoid people in the shots from the Seine and part of it was that I couldn't see the LCD screen on my camera too well in the glare. Then the cathedral is freaking huge. I mean, you don't really grasp it until you're standing there trying to fit it all into your camera lens, and then you're like, holy crap, that is one big freaking building. And it's optically difficult to capture, because either it's straight but everything around it isn't, or the stuff around it is straight, but the building isn't. It's so big, it sort of leans in, and that just makes it hard to get a good picture of for an amateur like me. I don't know how the pros do it, because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get a really good image of it. Though in my defense, part of that was in also trying to cut people out of it.

I wandered around Place du Parvis, snapping a few pictures and making a wish on Point Zero, the point from which all distances are measured from Paris. It's a copper octagon set in the ground, with a star in the center of it. See? :)

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I wanted to go up into the tower, but the line was hideously long, so instead, I cruised into the Ancien Cloitre Quartier, which is where the seminary students generally lived and hung out. It's one of the few medieval enclaves that survived Baron Hausmann's great brutish bulldozing. The streets are really narrow, so it was kinda fun watching people try to maneuver their cars around corners. And when I say narrow, I don't think my tiny little 1990 Civic would fit. I can understand why Hausmann wanted to create wide streets, and really he's responsible for Paris being the city it is today, but it pains me, the buildings he destroyed to make room for his wide, tree-lined avenues. At any rate, I saw this great medieval mansion which is now a seminary, if I remember correctly, and the house where Heloise and Abelard carried on is still there. Here it is, on the right side of the picture, in the one sepia image I shot.

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Here's the steeple of Notre Dame, from the other end of the same street. Note the patina'd saints wending around it.

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From there, I hung out in the square behind the cathedral and shot this.

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Then I wandered around l'Ile St-Louis for a while and looked at the 17th century mansions Louis Le Vau designed for the rich and famous of Paris society back in the early to mid 1600's. The house Camille Claudel lived and worked in is the prettiest and grandest, but it was also the biggest, and the street is narrow, so there was no getting a picture of it. It wasn't all that to look at, anyway, just had these great carved flower-filled pediments (that were too high up to get a good picture of) and was of this beautiful peach stone with a really great texture. It was awesome, but I didn't think a picture would really translate that well. Even the guy who was the valet to the Queen Mother (Anne of Austria) had a house there, so either he was pretty well-connected by birth, or being the Queen Mom's valet really paid well, back in the day. Le Vau is the same guy who designed Vaux-le-Vicomte, which is what caught the attention of the king and led him to hire the guy for Versailles. Obviously, he was THE guy for architectural design back then.

This is not Camille Claudel's house, and I don't know whether Le Vaux designed it or not. It just looked cool.

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From there, I crossed behind Notre Dame and looked at the Memorial de la Deportation, which is a memorial crypt for the 200,000 people from France who died in Nazi concentration camps, either because they were Jewish or gay or thought for themselves or failed for whatever reason to meet high standards of Nazi perfection. The best description I can give of the place is that it was stark. I didn't take photos, because it seemed really inappropriate. But you go down these steps into a white block stone courtyard that has a jagged perimeter and walls 20 or 30 feet high, with this jagged black metal sculpture at the far corner, to represent the concertina or barbed wire at the top of fences. To get into the crypt itself, you have to go down this little passage in the stone that's about 2' wide. The guy in front of me had to turn sideways. Then you're in this dim chamber with a candle burning in the center of what I seem to remember was a Star of David. It's roped off. Straight ahead of you is an iron gate with a hallway behind it that has thousands of lights glittering to represent the people who died in the camps, and there's an unknown Jewish person entombed right at the mouth of it, who died in I think Auschwitz, and there's a candle burning in front of his tomb. To the right and left are these enclaves that have dirt and ashes from each of the however many (12? 16?) Nazi concentration camps, all in these little "cubbies" in the wall that are shaped like triangles, with the names of the camps burned into the plaques. There are triangles all over the place, to represent the patches people had to wear to identify their "defect" to the Nazis, and outside, there's a table that tells you what color each was. Jewish political prisoners, by the way, had to wear a different color Star of David. I think it was red & black. Everyone else (non-Jewish) wore different color triangles, with the point down. Also in each enclave were representations of what the insides of cells and buildings were like, with a lot of corners and stuff so you can never see the horizon or what's coming next. If you were claustrophobic, that would have caused some serious problems. It was a pretty sobering and well done memorial/crypt.

From there, I crossed the Seine and went down the steps onto quai des Tournelles, where I took more images of Notre Dame, as well as Pont au Double, which I fell in love with. It's this huge, wrought iron bridge with these awesome 1880 details. Seriously, it's straight out of a movie set in gothic Europe. It totally reminded me of Van Helsing and was surprisingly graceful.

This is as good as it got for cathedral images, I'm afraid.

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Pont au Double:

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And Notre Dame from beneath Pont au Double, which is actually my favorite picture of the cathedral from the whole day:

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From Notre Dame, I headed over to the Palais de Justice and took a few pictures of that from the far end of the square and also of Sainte-Chapelle's steeple rising above the trees. Then I headed home to eat and get a much-needed drink of water, and on the way, I bumped into a family of Americans trying to figure out how to get to the Eiffel Tower on the subway. So I took them there and hung out with the 2 women while the husband and kids climbed the tower, and then I helped them on their way home and parted ways with them at La Motte Piquet, which is where we changed lines, they for 10 and me for 8. I finally got home around 10:00pm and downloaded all my photographs and then spent a few hours sorting them out into different folders, which is one thing I really wished I'd done last time before burning to cd. Today was a lazy day, spent inside while it poured rain and thundered, cleaning house and uploading images for you guys, and then I went to do laundry, ate dinner, watched Sweet & Low Down IN ENGLISH!!! and wrote you guys. Now I need to get ready for bed.

Peace out,
Katie

copyright 2002 - 2005 Katie Doyle; all rights reserved
Don't even think it, punk.






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