Cathedrals

Like many others, I've been shocked and upset by yesterday's fire in Notre Dame cathedral. I visit Paris often, really like both Paris and Notre Dame, and have been inside the cathedral many times, and climbed the towers a few times, but I still regretted every time I was there and didn't go inside. Last night in my FB feed, groups and real life there were many people who regretted that they visited Paris but haven't been inside even once, or were just planning to visit Paris for the first time this year.

Here is for them, and for the rest of us who are sorely missing the cathedral now:

During the WWI Reims Cathedral was bombed and then burned down, and look at it now! Yes, it took about 20 years to restore, but it is there again, and it's awesome. Notre Dame will get there. I'll miss it until then, but it'll get there.

In the meanwhile, while you are visiting Paris:

Look at it now! Reims Cathedral, I mean. It's beautiful, and it's within a day trip from Paris. Chartres Cathedral is also within a day trip, and even better (matter of taste, of course). Amiens. Beauvais, weird and badly built, but still beautiful and awesome. Saint-Denis, within the Paris public transportation and the oldest Gothic church in France. Bourges, if you have time for more than a day trip. Go see Sainte Chapelle, if you are not into day trips. Saint Eustache. Saint Germain De Pres.

They won't replace Notre Dame, but please remember that Notre Dame, even if restored to a great condition in reasonable time, won't replace them either. They are worth a visit in their own right.

France: Amiens, Rouen

I guess the fine art of vacation blogging still eludes me. I'll try though.

In October I started blogging about my trip to Paris and the the north of France, in November I got as far as Beauvais.

In real life everything was a bit faster.

Amiens had a beautiful cathedral, a nice riverfront, and hortillonnages, which are sort of gardens on a swamp. It also had gardens that were not on a swamp. At night the town was dead-dead-dead.

Rouen was quite a lot livelier than Amiens. Bigger, too. Full of half-timbered buildings. Or maybe half-full of fully-timbered buildings? Whatever.  Beautiful. Cathedral, churches, clock tower, pederstrian area. I am so totally gonna visit there again.

They were really proud of Jeanne d'Arc, which was a bit tasteless since their only connection with her was that they burned the poor kid at the stake. But their is Jeanne d'Arc this and Jeanne d'Arc that everywhere, the actual place of burning is marked, and there is a Jeanne d'Arc church next to it, which is shaped like a flame on the inside (how tasteless is that?) and has hanging eaves for some reason.

Beauvais

Beauvais is a small town a bit north of Paris. I always known it as the place Ryanair flies to because it's too damn cheap for CDG, and also, more charitably, as the place that has a cathedral with a famous clock. We figured that we would visit it on our way to Amiens.



On arrival we noticed in rural France, unlike in Paris, pretty much everything is closed on Sundays, and beheld the strangest structure.

It was quite lovely, and decorated as a proper Gothic cathedral should be, but it was the weirdest shape of all the cathedrals I have ever seen, and I have seen a few. It didn't have a nave. At all. Nor a spire.

Inside, it was the tallest church I'd ever seen (the tallest in existence, claims Wikipedia) - my photos don't quite do it justice - and had weird wooden things clearly keeping the walls from caving in.

 

The clocks was there too, with more faces than could fit into any picture, showing interesting things like the age of the world.



The flying buttresses outside looked very airy indeed, but clearly failed to buttress anything, and had to be propped up with huge iron beams.

Later I read up on the cathedral and learned that they never got around to building the nave in the first place, that they did in fact build a tower but it fell off about 500 years ago, that the choir caved in a bit and that it's quite a job to keep the damn thing standing. But damn, this marvel of medieval French architecture was beautiful and I wanna see it again.

More pictures here.

The vacation and pictures

The pictures are up, in Picasa (1600x1200) and on my own server (full size). There are as usual lots of them, sorted more or less geographically.

I visit Paris quite often, but it was only my second time in Rome, and the first one was rather short. Never been to Chartres or Ostia Antica before.

Paris was, well, Paris. Beautiful, but colder than it should be this time of the year. We rented an apartment in the 6th, Place Saint-Sulpice, and it was lovely, much nicer than any hotel I've ever been in. Been to Louvre, Museé d'Orsay (too many paintings for my taste, but it'd been a while since the last time), Notre-Dame, Palais Chaillot for some modern ballet (I didn't get its name or point, but very much enjoyed the dancing, and was even more impressed with the theater itself, all black and red and huge and vertical), Palais Garnier for the premiere of La Paquita (also quite amazing), and for the first time in many years did not go to Sainte Chapelle, which feels vaguely wrong.

Hmm, now that I am writing this: maybe fewer art museums and more theaters is the way to go for me in general?

Another new thing was the St. Eustache church in Paris. The cathedral in Chartres was amazing; my pictures are unfortunately not worthy.

The one new thing in Paris were the women (my best guess would be Eastern European gypsies) who pretend to find your ring and give it to you; I am not sure how this scam is supposed to work, but on a good day three people can find "your ring" in one block.

Rome was very beautiful too, but somehow not as enjoyable as Paris (few places are). Much warmer, though. The ancient ruins were interesting to see, Piazza Navona and Piazza della Rotonda were lovely, Spanish steps a bit overrated although it was nice to live a couple of blocks from there. Pantheon is incredible in being really ancient without being a ruin.

We'd seen more famous churches than I could imagine possible, and more paintings than I could imagine I'd survive. I even found a Gothic church (didn't know they had any), Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Among the not-so-touristy impressions were the astronomical amount of bird shit on an embankment one morning, and the astronomical amount of birds over the same embankment in the evening. The flocks were so huge they scared us; it looked like a horror movie.

The annoying scam thing of the season seemed to be men with flowers who give them for free to a woman and then demand money from the man who is with her. They do run away when you yell at them.

From Rome we visited Ostia Antica, the ruins of a fairly large city, abandoned in 4th century AD (fairly common story, it used to be a port and the sea went away). Well worth a day trip. Has Europe's oldest synagogue, too, or what's left of it.

A mean thought

The "suburban youths" (that's the politically correct French term for "thugs of a mostly North African origin"; simply "youth" is a term for a generic thug) have been rioting for the third night now.

Apart from the usual suspected reasons (religion of peace, gross misuse of amphetamines, the aesthetics of suburban architecture, the city's failure to build enough libraries for the thugs to read Nietzsche in, low IQ, and the employers' unexplicable reluctance to hire employees whose CV starts with "went to some school until I burned it down" and ends with "set a neighbor's car on fire"), can one of the reasons be simply a desire to be famous?

I mean, in a country where a convicted cop shooter (Mumia Abu-Jamal) becomes a honorary citizen of the capital and gets a street named after him in one of the "sensitive" suburbs is it inconceivable that some of the "suburban youths" might want to have a street named after themselves too?

Maybe I shouldn't have laughed at their Prime Minister yesterday when he said that people who shoot at cops are criminals. There really are a lot of people there who don't know it. The mayor of Paris, for example.

Anti-Darwin riots in France

15-year-old Moushin and 16-year-old Larami were riding a moped in Villiers-le-Bel, a suburb of Paris, last Sunday. The moped was stolen and not autorized for the public roads to begin with, the guys were not wearing helmets, and they were not much into various rules of the road, so at some point they ran into a police car and died.

Kind of sad, because IMO people don't really deserve to die for driving like shmucks, even on a stolen bike. But shit does happen, and this is as clear-cut a case of a Darwin award as any. Among any normal people this would have been an occasion to reflect upon human mortality, use of motorcycle helmets, and the uncomplicated relationship of these two things. The parents would have used this as an occasion to remind their children about the dangers of not using the helmets, the parents in better families might have reminded the children that stealing mopeds is not nice either, the brighter kids would have even googled to find out whether the cars have priority when they are coming from the right or from the left. Somebody would have possibly sued the manufacturer of the bike, just in case.

Not so in Villiers-le-Bel and the rest of Maghreb-sur-Seine. The local thugs, I mean "youths", decided that everything was the police's fault, that the police did it on purpose, and that the police left the boys without any medical help. The police are saying that firefighters came to help the boys but were unable to do so because the situation was too tense (about 50 hostile bystanders). One can of course say that it's the police's job to secure the area from the hostile bystanders, and rightly so; it does, however, sound a bit corny if said by the very same hostile bystanders. "Oh dear! We stone the fucking pigs every time we see them and the selfish bastards never stop to help us! Boys, get those Molotov cocktails!"

Anyway, during the two nights that followed 82 police officers were injured, 4 of them seriously, one police station was burned and another one robbed, the local library was also burned, as well as a number of businesses, cars and trash cans.

Inquiring minds want to know:

1. How many people were out there rioting? It would seem like it would take quite a lot of folks to do all of the above. The town has about 25000 inhabitants.

2. How does one burn and rob two police stations? What were the police doing at the time? (This is not an accusation: I am just curious whether there were too many rioters, not enough police, police not adequately armed, police not allowed to shoot, etc.)

3. Am I the only person who has serious trouble thinking of the rioters as fellow humans? I mean, I realize that they are, technically speaking, human beings, and should be recognized as such in a court of law (the sooner the better) and be presumed innocent and entitled to a lawyer, etc., but it's just very hard to imagine what is going through their minds, or that anything is in fact going through their minds.