Latest French escapades

Ok, I guess that's a teensy bit misleading ... I don't really do escapades. Mostly I go to art museums and eat unhealthy amounts of nutella. Although I've been cutting back, I swear! Mind, I've picked up a gummy worm habit instead, so I don't know that my sugar problem is actually getting any better ...

... but that's neither here nor there. What I've really been doing for the last two weeks is vacation. French schools run in 5-7 week sessions - I don't know what else to call them - each followed by a week or two of vacation. Thus after the first session, at the end of October, we had a week of vacation (this is when I went to Île de Ré), then after the second session was Christmas break, and now, at the end of the third, we got a lovely two weeks off.

The family I work for went skiing during the first week, and though they welcomed me to come along, I opted to house-and-cat-sit for the week instead, not being all that athletically inclined. I was a little nervous about being on my own for a week, but I got to spend a lot of time with the other au pairs in the area, and the cat kept me company at night, following me around the house with great dedication and sleeping on my bed.

That week really was nice. It gave me time to relax, get a few things done, sleep in, watch movies, and play the wii game "Just Dance" - which is surprisingly fun and addictive. The other girls and I cooked dinner together several times and generally just hung out.

One of the girls and I visited IKEA, which I think I shall write about next in its own post. It's kind of a big deal here.

The other big adventure of the week was visiting Chartres cathedral.

Y'all.

I have actually visited a fair number of churches. Not tons, but about 20 during interim in Rome, and a couple here in Paris. I have seen more impressive cathedrals, in terms of sheer size (ie. St. Peter's) but Chartres was, without a doubt, one of the most stunning buildings I've had the privilege to visit. From the inside, it's a fairly simple floorplan, but the outside of the building is warrened with flying buttresses and open corridors and the bulging outsides of rooms that you can't see from the inside:

It's wonderful, and huge. And the best part is how much is original - it's almost entirely the original medieval building, which means there are tons of statuary (literally) and all of the figures are unique and individual, from the huge sculptures next to the doors to the thousands of tiny figures around the tops of the arched entrances. Stunning.

You can see that they're cleaning it, which is a five year process. But the parts they've got done, like the top levels here at the front of the cathedral, are gorgeous, as you can see.

Also, I'd seen pictures of Chartres before (we studied some of the stained glass in an art history class), but somehow I'd never heard about the wall around the choristry, or whatever you call the place where the choir hangs out. It's a long wall, inside the church, that's absolutely encrusted with carvings: (Sorry for terrible picture quality - not a lot of light in this part of the church)

Pillars and decorative patterns, but also rows of round pictures around the bottom, and, best of all, huge scenes from the life of Christ, all about, oh, 10-12 feet off the ground. So sue me, I suck at estimating. Anyway, they're not really carvings, because all the statues are fully carved out. The statues are fully carved out, not attached the wall except at their bases. I estimate the standing adults are about 3ft tall. And they're beautiful, and moving. Here's the adoration of Christ by what I think are Magi, but which look sort of shepherd like:

We also walked the tourist circuit through the medieval part of the city, which was, well, picturesque. And old. It still amazes me, every time I'm in Paris, or Chartres, for example, how old things are! It's hard for me, and if I dare generalize recklessly, Americans as a whole, to understand how the weight of so much history shapes a country and its culture. Oh, we have history, to be sure, but in Europe you can feel it everywhere you go. There's much (MUCH) more consciousness of it, and more consciousness of (relatively) recent events such as WWI than I have ever seen in the US. WWI still affects people's attitudes on a daily basis. And while it had a huge effect on the national psyche of the US as well, it's not really something we still talk about much. Here it is.

All of which came out of a discussion of Chartres' medieval city, which was, on a more superficial note, picturesque: