Paris, je t'aime! Part 5: Wandering the Rive Gauche

In Part 4 of the posts about our Paris trip, we made the pilgrimage to Notre Dame and sealed our eternal devotion with a kiss above Pointe Zero.

Eating carbs - it's kind of our M.O.

We had a few hours to kill until it was time for us to climb the towers at Notre Dame, so we headed around the corner to Saint-Chapelle, another amazing church on the Ile de Cite.  When planning our trip, almost everyone who'd previously visited Paris was like, "yeah, Notre Dame is great, buuuuuttttt, OMG YOU HAVE TO SEE SAINT-CHAPELLE."  Chris visited it previously, and he also remembered it being pretty stunning, so when we had some extra time before our Notre Dame tower ticket could be punched, we headed a few blocks away to check it out.  Like Notre Dame, S-C is Gothic, and although it's a lot smaller, its main claims to fame are its amazing windows and smaller, more personal scale.

"Smaller" being relative, of course

While Notre Dame is all about stone and soaring heights, S-C is a more extravagantly colorful.

Shots from the bottom floor Visitors' Center

We climbed the spiral staircase (this could honestly be the main story of our vacation - everywhere, including every bathroom, was either up or down a spiral staircase)...

I'll be seeing staircases in my sleep for months

...and emerged into this:

I mean, not too shabby, right?

A few window close-ups:

"Noms!  This sword is delicious!"

Since we still had time before needing to be back at Notre Dame, we crossed onto the Left Bank, the Rive Gauche, and found a cafe, Le Depart, from where we could sit and watch the world go by while we ate second breakfast.

Mmm...croissants and baguettes!

They had Dreyer's ice cream on the menu!

It's a shame there's not an amazing, famous

ice cream shop just half a mile away!

While we cafe sat (a real thing in Paris, albeit not always at touristy spots like ours), we grabbed some shots of the nearby Metro station entrance, as it still had some of the antique fixtures:

Pigeon closeup 

We also got pictures of this cool building.  I have no idea what it was, but it was lovely:

OMG, a lady in a beret.

She's a tourist, too.

Still having some time to kill, we wandered to the Sorbonne, to see where Chris' Mom attended college.  The Left Bank is home to a few different colleges and universities, so it's known as the Latin Quarter, from the language in which most of the instruction used to occur.

So many motorbikes,

everywhere!

The Sorbonne!

We hit up their gift shop, then headed back toward the Seine, stopping a few more times to see cool things.  We saw a sundial created by Salvador Dali, which never really worked, mounted on the side of a building (apparently, he installed it himself in the 60's, along with his pet ocelet - yup, sounds about right), and then we progressed to the skinniest street in Paris, Rue du Chat qui Peche, the Street of the Fishing Cat.

A Left Bank street scene,

with Notre Dame poking up in the back

I can just touch both sides of the street with my fingertips.

If your wingspan is equal to your height,

this street is approximately 5'5" across.

We also made a stop at Shakespeare and Company, a famous English-language bookstore in Paris.  The original, in a different location, was owned by Sylvia Beach and her wife; they not only owned the bookstore, but also helped fund publishing for James Joyce's Ulysses, were buddies with Hemingway and Ezra Pound, and so on.  The original closed during the Nazi occupation in 1941 (damn Nazis!  Always in the way) and never reopened, but when a different American opened a bookstore in the current location in the 50s, the owner named it Shakespeare and Co in honor of Beach's contributions to the literary world.  It's still a real bookstore - all cool nooks and crannies they don't let you photograph - and was staffed when I visited by a kiddo from Seattle.

Notre Dame, across the Seine from S&Co.

More souvenir shopping!

Finally, it was just about time to scale the tower!  We headed back across the Seine and into another line, this time on the side of the cathedral.

While waiting, we took more pictures (of course we did!):

I love all the little gargoyles sticking out at the top

Eventually, our group was let into the entrance, and we waited in the gift shop while those who still needed tickets bought theirs (ours were included in the Museum Pass - seriously, if you're going to hit more than a few museums, towers, churches, and the like, the Pass is a great deal - plus, you get to skip most of the lines, other than those for security).

Sadly, they didn't let us climb through the tiny door.

You know I would have.

It was finally time to start our climb!  You climb up the north tower, then take a walk through what they call the Chimera gallery, named after the amazing gargoyles and other creatures you see (gargoyles are only the ones that serve as waterspots - the others are chimera).  You then go up the south tower for even more panoramic views, and then it's all the way back down to street level.  All totaled, it's about 400 stairs, all of them winding and cramped, and it's not for the faint of heart or those with crappy knees.  It was amazing.

Look:

Heading up and peeking out

Yeah, they don't let you jump off the towers anymore.

So lame.

It's kinda hard to stop taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower.

Time for the zoom lens!

On the spire of the transept crossing, there are these cool figures representing the apostles, which were reconstructed by Eugene Viollet-le-Duc in 1845 to replace the ones damaged during the Revolution.  Viollet-le-Duc put himself into the figure of Saint Thomas; he's the only apostle to look inward at the cathedral spire instead of outward toward the city, almost like he's saying, "look at what I made!"

 I feel this guy.

I'm always like, "crap! The earth just moved under me!"

Mmmm...

Coming back from the belfry - 

unsure about the status of his bats.

Up on top of the south tower:

Although it was kinda toasty,

the weather was really awesome for our climb.

A storm blew in later than day,

so we were really lucky.

More of the Pompidou Centre

With that, it was time to head back down and finish exploring the Left Bank!  On the next blog, more time spent on the Left Bank, both in the daylight and at night!

Later!

Amy