Bonjour Paris!

Day #1 in Paris, Day #7 traveling

My early morning view

Today, I had a flight from Vienna to Paris at 6:10 am.  This meant an EARLY 4:30 am cab ride to the airport because Vienna doesn't seem to have public transportation during the wee hours of the morning.  Although the flight was early and I was tired and a bit cranky, I checked watching a sunrise from a plane off my bucket list! The view was spectacular, and made better by the blanket of clouds we were flying over that reflected the beautiful colors of the sunrise.

My early flight allowed me to maximize my first day in Paris.  I couldn't check into my hostel until 4 pm, so I dropped my bags off and started sight seeing with my go-to first day sightseeing guide...the city's free tour!  For more on my love affair with free tours, see my blog about the one I did in Prague back in October.

St. Michael's monument

The free tour started out in St. Michael's plaza, where a gigantic statue of St. Michael sits in the middle of an intersections.  Not only is it gigantic, he's crushing Lucifer's head and casting him into Hell.  It's a pretty awesome statue.

We progressed towards a view of Notre Dame.  It was constructed 850 years ago and serves as the seat of the Archdiocese of Paris.  In Notre Dame, Napoleon invited all the European royalty and the guest of honor, Pope Pius VII, to his coronation in the cathedral.   He knelt before the Pope, and after a longwinded speech from His Holiness, Napoleon became impatient.  He seized the crown from the pope's hands and crowned himself.  The only King of France to crown himself.  After the coronation, Napoleon used this as a bargaining chip in debates "Even the pope wasn't good enough to crown me, only God himself."  (Or at least this is the tale my tour guide told us!)

The drunk party goers

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a favorite of my childhood, was written by a Frenchman who was horrified that the French had allowed the cathedral to fall into extreme disrepair.  So he wrote the book to bring awareness of the cathedral to the forefront of the city's mind.  It worked and and the Parisians saved Notre Dame from being demolished.

From Notre Dame we saw the San Chapelle, it was built by Napolean to house Christ's Crown of Thorns and the nails from his Cross.  Since then, it was moved to Notre Dame.  The Chapel is 75% stained glass and I'm planning on going inside tomorrow.

King Henry VII

We moved from the San Chapelle to the Seine where we walked for a little bit along the river.  We saw the "New Bridge", which is actually the oldest bridge in Paris.  When it was built by King Henry VII, it was the first stone bridge in Paris...hence the name New Bridge.  To celebrate the opening of the bridge, King Henry threw a huge costume party with all of his friends and allowed them to drink all the Royal wine collection.  The drunk guests were upset when the wine was gone, so he opened up the champagne collection.  With everyone stumbling around out of their minds, he had the fantastic idea to have the royal artists draw all the people in their costumes.  The morning after, not remembering the night, King Henry had a whole stack of photos to help him figure out the night and decided to memorialize the night by adding the face of each guest to the bridge, making it the "first wall post where he tagged a bunch of drunk friends."

The Louvre!

King Henry VII was an incredibly popular king in France, but also the subject of a ton of assassination attempts. The 24th assassination was successful. The statue of King Henry shows that he died of "unnatural causes".   It's only true on most equestrian statues in Western Europe.  If the horse has two feet raised, then the person riding it died of unnatural causes.  All four feet on the ground means they died of natural causes.  And if the horse is rearing up on its hind legs, its rider died heroically in battle.

The Institute of French was the next stop.  It's where very special people decide important aspects of the French language...like whether an I-Pod should be feminine or masculine (took them 5 months!).  They also ban English words from the French dictionary and create French words to replace them.  This is actually news in France, as my friend, Pierre, told me that the Institute just banned the word "hashtag".

St. Joan of Arc

The tour ended with a view of the Eiffel Tower...my first! The tour guide said the Tower brings in 48 million euros from tourists, but it only has an eight million euro profit because the light show costs 40 million euro a year.  I also saw an obelisk that Napolean stole from Egypt.  It's over 3000 years old.  The Frenchmen in charge of putting it up in the center of the square were so proud that they figured it out without damaging the monument, they put the directions in gold on the base of the obelisk.

Eiffel Tower!

After the tour, I met up with my friend Pierre.  We both had internships in Washington D.C. last summer and I played the role of a tour guide in DC so today he showed me around a little.  We visited his school's chaplaincy, much like an American university's Newman Center.  Then we walked around Paris some, I saw the mayor's residence and a beautiful French carousel.  And then had cheesecake and tea at a cafe in the Jewish quarter...which happened to have Polish owners.  Cheesecake labeled "Sernik" was the give away.  The owners even spoke Polish to me!

Carousel with Notre Dame
in the background

Since in DC, I invited Pierre to the diocese's young adult group, he suggested I join the chaplaincy for Mass and dinner tonight.  It was really cool to see young French people in a worship setting!  There's hope in France...there must be hope for the world!  Probably the best part of the day was being able to talk with Pierre about the church and politics in France and the U.S, especially because he is helping out with the French movement against gay marriage.  There are many parallels in terms of youth movements of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and France.  Young people are demanding more traditional, faithful churches and services.  And it's always great to talk about faith with a friend.