Advertisement
Published: September 24th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Versailles reunion
Oh, those crazy Furman students Finally, a real update thanks to wifi internet access. I'm actually in Pau now, checked into my hotel, but I'm going to back up and fill you in on my weekend in Paris/Versailles, so indulge me, if you will ;-)
CouCou tout le monde!
So here I am, safe in France and back in the bosom of my loving French family. I have missed them so so much, and I’m so happy for the chance to spend time with them before I head for Pau. I left Wednesday evening from Philadelphia. Now, for those of you familiar with other installments of “Kate flies home: Tales of Terror from our nation’s airports”, you know that Philly and I do not exactly have the greatest track record. They’ve lost my luggage at least twice, and my flights always seem to get delayed or cancelled. Maybe the icon of St. Christopher that Clary and Elizabeth gave me really worked though, because this flight was blessedly uneventful. No screaming children. No lost bags….I even had an empty seat next to me! The worst thing that happened was the bottle neck at passport control, but even that wasn’t awful. So I lug my massive
Versailles reunion
Mme. Chauchat et moi, reunited at last! bag off the belt and find Chrystel, aka my French Mom, waiting for me at the exit. I love that woman so much. She was so nice to come and get me at the airport so early in the morning, and to let me stay with them for my 4 days in Paris/Versailles.
From the airport we drove to St. Denis, where my French little sister Raphaelle is in boarding school. I can’t believe she started high school this year. The rule is that she was supposed to stay little and a perpetual 14 forever so that I wouldn’t feel old. We had breakfast in a café while we waited for Raph’s class to let out so we could go visit her. Here’s the thing about St. Denis…it’s the “quartier chaud”, or red light district, of Paris. It’s absolutely fine during the day, but you’d want to be on guard after dark. So for the most part, it’s all this super modern, vaguely hideous construction, and then you round a corner and…voila, there’s this immense, gorgeous, amazing cathedral staring you right in the face and taking your breath away. Raphaelle’s school is actually in the former abbey attatched to the church, right next door. It’s very “Harry Potter” esque, as Chrystel said, with these long wrought iron staircases and a big English dormitory style dining hall. It also has absolutely gorgeous gardens and ivy covered walls…the whole bit.
So here’s what I love about France. Even when someone tells you “no”, there’s always a way around it. You just have to know which buttons to push. The woman at the front desk told Chrystel that it would be absolutely “impossible” for us to see Raph between her classes, but Chrystel persisted and said she had something she really needed to give to her daughter, and plus here was her American friend who had JUST gotten there today and Raphaelle would be so happy to see me, even for only 10 minutes. So the woman picks up the phone and makes a call, and just like that, she’s allowed to meet us in the gardens. I can’t believe how much Raph has grown up in just two years! We were so excited to see one another, we just stood there hugging in the garden for probably about 5 of those 10 minutes. She comes home each weekend, so I’ll get to see more of her before I leave.
After we left the school, we went and took a tour of the cathedral. Even though jet-lag was starting to kick in big time, I’m really really glad we did. See, St. Denis is also the burial site of all the kings of France, all the way back to the kings of the 9th and 10th century. You can walk around and see all the sarcophagi of hundreds of years of monarchs, and by looking at them you see how philosophy, and as a result, art, have changed over the centuries. The sarcophagi from the middle ages have their eyes open, awaiting the last judgment. They look as they did in life, all clothed and coroneted (well, except for the crowns that were smashed into pieces during the Revolution…the whole royalty thing didn’t go over so well then), their shoes still on so they can get up and march into heaven. Later, in the renaissance, The kings and queens are portrayed in the statues as dead. Some are really pretty graphic, with emaciated skeletons and even rigor on the lips. Because of the plague and other disease, people were so familiar with death it didn’t even shock them. Others just look like the ruler is asleep. But now, the forms are nude and covered with sheets, and their eyes are closed. Anyways, I could go on and on about all the fascinating stuff we learned on the visit, including what they did with the tombs during the Revolution, but I know most people aren’t French nerdy enough to care. I think the coolest thing for me was getting to see the tombs of Henri IV, Marguerite de Navarre, and Catherine de Medici, since I read that great biography of Marguerite this summer. My only regret was that I was too jet lagged to think about digging out my camera, but I’m not sure how much I would have been allowed to photograph anyway. Pictures will be coming soon though, I promise.
That night, the phone rings a little before dinner and it’s Chrystel’s sister-in-law, saying that there is a crazy American boy standing outside her gate yelling for me. Sure enough, it was Hamilton, who’d gotten to Versailles a couple days earlier. He’d looked up “de la Bigne” in the phonebook and found Etienne’s brother instead of us. So, his wife called up Chrystel and then sent Hamilton our way. He told me there was a dinner for the whole Versailles group at Pakito, a tapas restaurant in Versailles, and we were invited to join them. Now, I was practically dead on my feet at this point, but there was no way I was going to miss seeing all my former professors and the Furman French majors, so off we went. The dinner was a great time. I got to speak Italian with Mme. Videl, catch up with Mme. Chauchat, and play M. Sinniger’s trivia game about the history of France. There were bottles of sangria floating all around the table (I think I counted 7 by the end of the night), and as I was leaving, Jordan and Natalie were busy “drague”ing the server (that’s to say flirting with him.) Ah, La France…it makes flirts of everyone! (or maybe that was the sangria, I don’t know).
Advertisement
Tot: 0.076s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0477s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
murdock
non-member comment
beware the crazy American boy!