The next morning we walked to the see the cathedral in daylight. We went inside it; it’s gothic and didn’t have too much interesting stuff inside. There was a poster about WWII damages, which were minimal. We walked to another plaza in Rouen where we saw the spot where Joan of Arc was executed. It’s marked by red and orange flowers. It’s also right outside a church which was built in the 1970s. The church looks like a boat and its roof is part of the roof of an adjacent market. The stained glass windows were much older than the church and Jess explained them to me (in terms of technique, etc.). Then we took another awesome train and were off to Paris!
We dumped our stuff in the hostel and headed toward the Ile de la Cite to see Notre Dame and St. Chapelle. St. Chapelle was the one touristy thing I couldn’t do last time I was here. It was closed the few times I tried to go. It was built as a private chapel for Louis IX. It’s actually two chapels in one, but the lower one is far less interesting. The upper chapel is basically a stained-glass lover’s paradise. There are 15 stained glass windows with more than 1,000 scenes depicted. There are also more than 100 painted columns with different foliage-inspired capitals. The chapel is not particularly large, but it’s not miniscule either. Light enters the room and the stained glass windows become as bright as candy. This was the one place in Paris that I had studied in art history class and really wanted to see. I’m glad I finally got to see it the second time around.
Crossing the Seine, we arrived in the St. Michel area and went to Shakespeare and Co., a fabulous English bookstore. We didn’t stay long because it was too tempting to buy everything there. Next we walked through the St. Germain area and went to Assouline, another amazing bookstore. It was easier to visit this one because the books are too large to carry in our backpacks and way too expensive to purchase. The store is arranged as if you are in someone’s personal library. We finished up our tour of the other side of the Seine with a visit to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where my French-book characters would eat lunch during breaks from their classes at La Sorbonne. We spent time watching people play tennis, then walked by the fountains and headed towards the river.
On our way back towards the hotel, we passed many theaters and people going in to see plays. We stopped to see what one theater was showing: an operetta called Pastorale. We impulsively bought student tickets for 15 euro and went to the opera! Everything was in French, so we’re not 100 percent sure what we saw. We do know that the “sets” were awesome because they weren’t traditional sets at all. Instead they were video projections. Guy in hoodies had video cameras on either side of the stage. Sometimes they filmed a mini-scene– like rocks in a pool of water or a diorama of a castle. Other times they filmed a person or paint dripping down a vertical board. They used three smaller screens in addition to a backdrop screen and, sometimes, a screen in front of the actors. One of the funnier “sets” was a countryside scene where a character was meant to be walking. She was on a treadmill in the center of the stage, walking slowly. There were three people with sheep puppets moving around in front of her. On the side screens, video was projected of the puppets. The center screen projected a feed of wooden sheep being moved along a table by another guy, off to the side of the stage. The company also used cameras when people were lying down, like in a bed. These cameras were placed above the actors, giving the audience a bird’s eye view. All in all, I was surprised at how much I was able to understand by reading the sub-titles, but was frustrated that I couldn’t understand everything. The show seemed to be about a guy in love with a girl but she’s with his brother. The guy then almost drowns in a stream, is saved by three crazy nurses and brought to a castle/tower. He’s imprisoned by a weird guy in all white, including white platform shoes and white hair, who controls most of the characters. The white guy than makes our lover dress like a girl to become friends with the girl he lusts after. They wind up in bed together, as two girls, she finds out, freaks and kicks him out. The girl (the real girl, not the guy pretending to be a girl) then dies, end story. Needless to say, it was a different night: a bit out of the norm.
No comments:
Post a Comment