Day 20: PARIS TRIP--Anime in Versailles

Escaping the Protestant Violence

After Dr. Seely gave me a fifty euro note, our coach driver Tony made an appearance about 8:30, ready to load us all out to Chartres ("shart") Cathedral. We rolled through the French countryside in new sunlight, to a large village out in the hills. The little houses were wreathed in sunflowers and emerald rose bushes, brookes and water wheels and iron-wrought fences. The cathedral stood in the center, mismatched towers looming over delis and one cheerful Ferris wheel. It was by happy chance that we ran into the only two elders in Chartres--they were walking along a cobbled road, and someone spotted their nametags from the coach window. We parked and thirty very enthusiastic girls swarmed them, announcing that we were from BYU and we LOVE elders and demanding to know where they were from. One had been out six months--he did most of the talking, as the year-long elder looked scared out of his mind to see such a mob of womenfolk.

The Cathedral is half Romanesque, half flambouyant Gothic (for everyone confused, check out Wikipedia) due to a massive fire. Some stories say that the people of the village loved God so much that they spent however many years rebuilding it; others take a more practical approach and believe that Chartres' economy tanked after the Cathedral was half-destroyed (it was house to the Virgin's shirt worn at the conception (or birth, no one really knows)) and they needed to revitalize it. We all soon saw how eager they were; the walls had enough jeweled glass to fill a football field multiple times over. The profs handed us all sets of headphones and we could hear Dr. Seely whispering into a microphone, trying not to interrupt the service in the choir chapel.

The Window Club was comprised of students, each assigned to describe a particular window. Mine was the South Rose window, which depicts Apocalyptic Christ and his apostles, surrounded by eight angels, a man, ox, lion, and eagle, and the twenty-four elders of the Second Coming. The sun rested just beyond the ruby panes and dazzled us all as I tried to explain what we were squinting to see. Many students had story windows, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son windows, where each scene in the story is depicted in tiny panes--theirs were considerably longer descriptions. The Blue Mary and Life of Mary windows took a super long time, simply because we members of the Church are entirely unfamiliar with worship of the Virgin in other denominations. I learned that Catholics also believe Mary was immaculately conceived (brought about by a Holy Ghost conception) and that her life was devoted to wisdom and the development of skills, making her a saint of Catholic universities. The Blue Mary window has blue and red hues that cannot be reproduced in stained glass, even by modern technology--they were marvelous to see. We were glad that the Protestants never really made it this way in France to destroy the glass windows like they had in so many other places.

A House Visit: Louis XIV

As we made our way back into Paris after some paninis in Chartres, the temperature jumped to 80 some degrees. Poor Andrea and Annie had left their museum passes at the hotel, and needed to pay the seven euros to get into Versailles--a steal, compared to some cathedrals and Woolf's house back in England. Getting out into the dusty air, we saw the gilt facade of the palace, guarded by gold gates and gaggles of Japanese tourists. I marvelled at their dedication to Western fascination. But then, it's the largest fetching palace east of Disneyland.

The lovely afternoon was spent with Mandy, a super smart and snarky girl who looks like a model and put up with my basically sprinting through the palace rooms. The Hercules room was one of the first, after we made sure to see the bust of Louis XIV (Mandy's assignment for Humanities), and that's where Versailles began to get weird. Instead of the Herculean something that was supposed to be in the middle of the room as described by the headset, there was a titanic plastic sculpture, pink and green and purple and polka-dots, that had clearly been engineered this decade. I shrugged it off and headed into the next room.

But no! Instead of Ming vases, there were little sculptures of children that looked like they were from Animal Crossing. The atrium before the hall of mirrors had a Sailor Moon (yep, life-sized) and we had to skirt a million Asian tourists to even get into the mirror room. These bizarre Japanese sculptures were seen in the Sun King's bedroom, the Napoleon room (titled "The Emperor's New Clothes", a squat statue of an angry anime king (I laughed)), the hall of mirrors (looked like a giant ball of seaweed with smiling daisies all over it--my favorite), and even out in the center of the gardens (a monstrous gold piranha plant, looked like something out of Mario). Mandy and I laughed so hard.

Locked Out

The gardens awaited, so naturally our little tour through the Palace took maybe forty minutes (there are only so many gold ceilings one can appreciate in the course of an afternoon), leaving us with an hour and a half to tour the gardens. It was Music in the Park day, and we could barely hear baroque classical wafting out from the bushes...Mandy and I joined the mob going through to the gardens, herded by two security guards who weren't exactly paying attention. The sun beat down on the white roads, and the fountains weren't spouting. It was all French formal, so straight lines, tall hedges, perfect lines of perennials and Greek statues--all very impressive, all added to by the Vivaldi or whatever issuing from unseen intercoms.

Mandy wanted to walk the length of the canal, and I was enthused to say we had. We made sure to note the Apollo fountain before heading out of the gardens--we were surprised to see a checkpoint heading out to the canal and more public property, but we paid it no mind. Our museum card had gotten us out to the gardens, hadn't it? So we spent a happy time walking between rows of trees, noticing that one girlfriend definitely wasn't wearing a shirt as she lounged out on the grassy bank with her boy. Paris, sheesh. There were kids on bicycles, older couples out on walks, and dorky tourists like us taking pictures. At the end of one canal arm, it occurred to us that we might not make it back in time. So we cut through the bushes on the way back and were glad we had enough time to get back to the coach.

Naturally, the checkpoint guard stopped us coming back in, so we pulled out our museum cards. He looked at us incredulously and shook his head.

"What? No, see, we just CAME from the gardens."
"Do you have a ticket?"
"No, we got in on these."
He looked doubtful.
"I can't let you in without a ticket."
"What ticket? These passes let us in!" (I held up the Versailles section and pointed at the Jardins, hoping that whatever the card said in French let us back in.) But the guard said he wouldn't let us in.

I was seriously considering jumping the gate and making a break for it. We had fifteen minutes to get back to the coach and were stuck walking around the outside of the whole palace. Mandy was going to just pay, but I didn't have enough euros for this! So we were shunted aside, trying to figure out where to go, when the Tates and Seelys walked by. Thanks to some of Sister Tate's French, the directors got us back in and we headed to the coach. As it turned out, the security out front hadn't paid enough attention to realize that we didn't pay the seven euros necessary to even enter the Versailles gardens. So viola, we got in for free and just about missed the coach. A lucky day? Probably.

Another Skyline View

After dinner at an Italian pizza place, the group wanted to go to Eiffel Tower. I told Nikki I would just take the Metro back to the hotel, but she wouldn't let me go by myself--before long, Ben decided to navigate us to Arc De Triomphe, and I couldn't be more pleased. I felt bad about changing everyone's plans, but they shrugged it off and said we needed to see it anyway.

A bit of mishap (getting separated from Liz and our fearless leader) Andrew, Nikki and I headed up those 200 some odd stairs and found them already at the top. Liz was overjoyed to see us. We spent a long time up there, taking pictures for more Asian tourists, capturing the Eiffel next to a full moon, and just looking at the gleaming lights in the buildings below. Count on Ben to start a round of Guess that Person, and count on me to get it right. We didn't get in until right before midnight, but we all rejoiced in the idea that the next day was for the conquering and we were free to do what we liked. As I unpacked next to my little cot and listened to BBC announce money-laundering in the Vatican bank, I hoped that the museums tomorrow believed in toilet seats, unlike the rest of Paris. But I'll be optimistic.