mothwing | Paris II (Reply)

It's amazing how little I remember of my school French, and yet, how much comes back when I'm surrounded by native speakers. Because everybody speaks English I did not have to use my A2 French to full advantage, but it's still comforting to know that in a pinch, I can buy meringues in various flavours in French. Ordering food at the restaurant we had lunch at did not work as well and thus we switched to English, but speaking the language after such a long time was still a very nice experience. Today, we had a look at Notre Dame and the Operas. There is so much to see that I only have pictures of a fraction of the interesting things that we did see, and even those are too few.

This church is going to be 850 this year, so everybody is pretty excited.

Lines everywhere. It's remarkable that once inside the cordoned-off area for worshippers was still considerably more empty than the touristy bit on the sides. There were also signs every second meter reminding people to shut up since this is a place of worship and not to use flash photography. Since people were happily taking pictures during service, this seems a good rule. Which still many failed to observe. Some people. I would not want to work there.

I am not catholic, but attending the international mass in this church still gave me all sorts of feelings I'm not used to any more.

Mini Notre Dame!

We did get to hear the organ, but we didn't see much of it. It's really impressive. Sadly, due to the liberal use of microphones and speakers one of the most interesting features about the chuch's architecture that Crocky's Prof. K. used to point out, namely that music coming from the choir seems to be coming from all sides and can appear to be polyphonic even though it's not, was impossible to detect, but I could imagine it anyway.