Cool Stuff in France

I just finished a post on traveling with potentially bored teenagers. Now I am going to write about traveling as a bored middle aged woman.

I have been to Paris several times before, and I am eternally grateful. I love it, but the mind also loves novelty. In 2010, Eleanor and I went to London and we had a blast. I would love to go to Italy or Spain or Switzerland or Germany. But I was back in Paris.

It wasn't that I don't like Paris--it was that I had already seen the sight before. I had already been to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and the L'Arch de Triomphe. Poor me, right?

The trip surprised me. I was excited that we saw things that I hadn't seen before, which was awesome. Some of the stuff we saw was stuff that isn't on the tour bus route. We saw the Musee de Cluny -- national du Moyen Age. It was the best museum I saw in Paris. It was tiny, had no line to get in, wasn't so crowded you couldn't move, you could see the whole thing in less than two hours and it had really cool stuff. Win-win-win-win-win. It was small but the collection was diverse. There were paintings, sculptures, stained glass, tapestries and furniture, amongst other stuff.

First, they had examples of stained glass up close. Normally when you see stained glass in a church, it is high up and there is so much the eye can't pick up details. I thought it was just glass, but they painted on the glass. These small samples....

Looks like graffiti was alive and well in the Middle Ages.

Make this....

....look way more impressive, as if it isn't impressive enough already.

The best part were the "Lady and the Unicorn" tapestries.

I learned that the old marble statues were originally painted, but most paint wears off after a few hundred years. 

All of this medieval art was stored in a castle from the Middle Ages, as you can see in the background of this old picture. I imagine the planning committee of Paris sitting around discussing: "We have a castle in the Latin Quarter. What should we do with it?" Duh. Make it a museum.

We also visited the Catacombs, which houses the bones of more than six million Parisians in limestones quarries 83 steps below the streets. We had to wait in line for three hours to see the catacombs. I don't think the tour buses stop here. I didn't take many pictures down there--it was a sacred place

Another cool part was seeing La Ligue 1 game in Caen. When people asked me what I liked the best, I say seeing this game. I think it was because it was one of the few places on the whole trip where we were the only tourists around for miles. Plus it was fun. Futball is like Friday night high school football in the Midwest. People take this seriously, cheer like crazy, and the boys play with a speed and fierceness that is hard to notice on television. It was the first time I have ever seen a bicycle kick in a game.

Finally, I loved Sacre Coeur. We have seen numerous churches and places of worship, but this place touched me. I lit a candle there for my mom and dad. There were a half dozen little coves outside the main part of the church, and I stopped and prayed for the first time in years. I understood why people made such effort to make churches beautiful and tall. It allowed people to lose themselves in something bigger and more powerful than they are. I suppose that is the reason to trek halfway around the world to go to a place where we don't fit in and by nature feel out of place--to find ourselves. All along our trip, we probably saw more tourists than we saw native french. Like many other travelers, I am aghast when I see tourists. As a prominent Seattle-ite Eric Liu once said, "We all complain about traffic, but how often do we realize we are the traffic?"