Chartres

      I had been looking forward to our trip to Chartres for quite some time, and I am happy to report that it met and surpassed my expectations.  After a short drive, we got our first glimpses of the cathedral and it, like Mont. St. Michel, loomed over the flat countryside.  For some reason, at a distance it seemed huge, standing outside it seemed small, inside it felt huge again, and from the very top it was ginormous!  Goes to show you that perspective is everything.  We started out with a tour from this little old lady who was intent on describing in detail what felt like every single piece of stained glass, but she was quite intelligent so that made up for what otherwise would have been a long-winded monologue.

      The intricacy of each little facet was just amazing.  For something so big and built so fast, there is so much detail and attention payed to each statue and carving.  They are currently doing a renovation in which they are cleaning every surface to reveal the original plaster and stone underneath.  Despite rumors, they are not actually repainting the surface but simply cleaning it, and the windows, whose detail had been obscured nearly completely, are being restored as well.  The parts that they have completed are a completely different color and light is actually allowed to pass through the windows.  The effect was quite astonishing as I have always seen these cathedrals after centuries of smoke and dirt had blackened them, and it was interesting to get to see the church as the original makers had intended.  It was not longer a dark, old cathedral, but a place of light and color.  Purists have made many complaints that the restoration is taking away from the feel of age and history, but from an art historical viewpoint it is a treat to get to see cathedral as it was intended to be seen.  The Mona Lisa wasn't supposed to be yellowish and was originally praised for its vibrant colors and realism.  It is only because of layers of lacquer that have damaged it to this point, and it will continue to become more obscured with time.  

It is so hard to photograph the detail while retaining the great sense of scale.

That main cross is about 20' above where I'm taking the picture.

      After a wonderful lunch spent laughing and talking together over goat cheese burgers and fries, we decided to hike up the 320 steps to the top of the cathedral to see the view.  I would highly suggest not eating a burger and fries before taking on such a challenge, but I would suggest the trip up as one of the best ways to experience the cathedral.  The view was amazing and it was pretty darn cool to get to see all of those gargoyles and other Gothic fanciness up close.

      After we hurried down the dizzying, tight spiral staircase to meet the bus, we drove over to the Ateliers Loire which is a famous stained glass making workshop that has done commissioned work all over the world for three generations.  The nice guy there gave us a tour of the workshops and told us about the entire process from start to finish of making a stained glass window.  Each room had a specific place in the process and at each phase he did a little demonstration to show us how he used the tools, chose the colors, decided which type of glass to use, and the various ways of putting the glass together.  By the end I think we all wanted to become glass workers and move to Chartres to work in his shop.

This is the window where they have samples of all the glass they have in stock.

His house, workshops on right, and a yard full of his family's creations.

      After a tour of the workshops in which our jaws just hung down the entire time, he showed us the little little winding path around his yard that is lined with works of glass instead of flowers.  With the sun low in the sky, the light was perfect for hitting each piece that had been strategically placed to let the sun shine through it.  It was pretty cool, and yet again I failed to get adequate photos of his amazing works.  I definitely wouldn't mind learning how to work with glass or even getting a job sweeping floors at a glass makers.  And thus our day-cation ended with a relaxing bus ride back to the city.  

Mont St. Michel

      Well, this post is really long in coming as this trip was two weeks ago, but I figured better late than never.  After a restful nights sleep after visiting St. Malo, I rose early and was greeted with a very nun-like breakfast of coffee and a piece of bread.  Small, but enough to tide me over.  While waiting for the others, I took a little walk and ended up in a dog park that had a trail leading down to the water.  I only had a few minutes so I ran down the roughly seventy steps and landed on this little inlet beach surrounded by scraggly black rocks and moss covered oak trees.  In the early morning with the sun just coming up, it was a very cool place to be.  

      Almost as soon as I took these pictures I had to run back up to meet the bus and got there just in time to not be the last one on.  We then took an extremely scenic drive along the coast to Mont St. Michel.  That is one of the top bird watching areas due to its location along migration routes, and there were tons of some of the biggest bird flocks I've ever seen flying in unison and undulating in all directions while somehow not running into each other.  This area is also known for its fuites de mer (shellfish) and especially les huîtres (oysters), and thus we passed many, many oyster farms and these amphibious harvesting vehicles to accommodate for the extreme tides that make using a boat near impossible or at least highly impractical.  

      Because there are no cars on Mont St. Michel, we parked the bus and walked for about forty minutes to the island on the narrow causeway that connects it to the mainland.  It is one of the most surreal places that I've ever been because you are completely surrounded by a flat estuary and right in the middle is this truly ginormous island.   

Almost the whole group on the causeway

(adding a filter instantly improves bad photos, I'm in love!)

      When we finally arrived, we wound our way up the only street and then climbed even more stairs that just kept going with seemingly no end until we finally reached the main level of the cathedral.  It was definitely another one of those cool places with tons of nooks and crannies, stones worn with centuries of use, and little green plants and moss growing out of every available piece of dirt.  Our audio guides, which we now have the ability to understand [!!!], led us around all the little rooms and narrow stairways.  From each little window the view was absolutely amazing and you could see for miles.

I would like this door for Christmas please.

      We were really lucky to be able to see it at high tide as all previous APA groups have only seen it at low tide where pretty much all of this water is gone and replaced with mudflats.  After the tour, we took the shuttle back to where we would be having lunch.  It was extremely good and we all got a taste of the local specialty.

      It took a minute or two to warm up to the idea of eating a raw oyster, but with pinky out and one big gulp I managed to get it down.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it also wasn't something I look forward to repeating.  It was super salty and chewy and surprisingly it didn't taste like mud or dead fish like I had expected, but as it turns out, I'm allergic to them and spent the rest of the trip home trying to stop my mouth from itching.  After my French oyster experience, I had the most amazing dish of agneau de pré-salé wrapped in a pastry dough.  Agneau de pré-salé, or salt meadow lamb, is a local delicacy made from sheep that have been raised on marsh grasses and herbs that have a high salt content because of their closeness to the ocean which gives the meat a distinctive taste that left me begging for more.  Courtesy of my host-mom, I have been eating a lot of lamb lately, so I was actually able to taste the subtle difference between regular lamb and this kind, and now know why it is so coveted.  

      With tired feet and full stomachs, we headed back to Paris where I know we all slept very well!  I absolutely love our outings together where we get to spend some time together not worrying about school and just enjoying being foreigners in a beautiful country.

Much love to all of you back home!

-Kate Alice