Paris, Day 3

Day Three's plans took us to the neighborhood of Montmartre and the Basilica du Sacre-Coeur.  

The Basilica looked oddly eastern or Asian surrounded by apartments and highrises, but the contrast made it more beautiful.  

Three or four long flights of wide steps marched up the hillside to the Basilica's doors.  Along the way, we passed people who were walking or resting and one man doing an elbow plank on the grassy hillside.  That was rather amusing.  As the saying goes, it takes all sorts of people to make a world.  A couple street musicians had also set up camp along the stairs along with a live statue dressed all in white.  We passed them up though and arrived at the foot of the Basilica.

It was just as grand and beautiful as Notre-Dame but in a different way.  I liked the grace of the arches and domes and how white it was against the blue sky.  Again, no photos were allowed inside the Basilica.  However, the inside was beautiful too.  Marble floors, arched ceilings, gold embellishments.  The ceiling of the middle dome was painted with gold-hued depictions of Bible stories.  There were quite a few people in the Basilica as well but not as many as in Notre-Dame.  

We wandered in the Basilica for about forty-five minutes before going out and around to the side to climb the stairs to the top of the dome.  More stairs.  So many stairs.  By the end of all of that stair climbing, I'd say we were stair-climbing pros.  And along the way, we got some close-up views of the gargoyles on the Basilica.  However, these gargoyles weren't scary creatures.  Instead, they were animals.

Then we came out at the top, again feeling like we had just climbed out on top of the world.

We were in narrow closed-in gallery that ringed the Basilica's largest dome.  Past tourists had scrawled graffiti all over the walls - how I don't know because the marble was as hard as, well, rock - but the other groups of people up there with us were nice, not the graffiti-scrawling type, I hoped.  It was kind of a bummer that people had defaced such a beautiful building, but at the same time, I wondered if their motives were the same as the motives of the people who had built the Basilica - or any other monument for that matter.

The Basilica was still beautiful though, and I really liked the pillars and arched windows that made perfect frames for the view.

After exploring the Basilica, we wandered around the neighborhood of Montmartre.  The narrow streets were cobbled with rectangular gray stones and lined with colorful houses with flowering window boxes and orange clay chimneys.  One house was almost completely covered in ivy.  It looked like the walls were made of green leaves with rectangles cut in them for windows.  Cars and motorcycles had to go at a crawl down the streets because of the lack of width, the plethora of tourists, and the complication of other parked cars.  I guess that's why I haven't seen any pickup trucks or SUVs in France (or Germany or Italy for that matter): there's simply no space for big vehicles.

During our neighborhood wanderings, we stumbled upon one of the places I'd put on my To See List.  It was Place du Tertre, a square full of street artists.  Well, almost full anyway.  A restaurant had set up a large tent and tables in the center of the square, but around the periphery, artists had camped out with easels, artwork, tables, and chairs sheltered by umbrellas.  The artists were men and women, usually in their forties or older.  They all had past works for sale on display, but most of them were also working on a new piece to while away the time.  There were numerous paintings of Paris's attractions - the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, etc. - but each artist had found a way to make the picture his or her own.  There were impressionistic paintings, realistic paintings, quirky colorful paintings with no background, even collage paintings.  There were also portrait and caricature artists whom people could sit for and have their portraits drawn (for a fee of course).  I stood behind a couple of the artists and watched them sketch.  They were so fast and confident with their pencil strokes!  I think drawing a portrait for a paying customer in public would make me so nervous I would draw at a snail's pace.  But these artists didn't seem to care. 

A and I bought a sandwich and a quiche for lunch and then stopped in at an ice cream place with beautiful displays of ice cream.  Then we left the Montmartre neighborhood and rode the Metro to another park to sit, journal, and read.  This park was smaller than Luxembourg Gardens but still had plenty of people in it.  However, they all seemed like local Parisians, not tourists, just out for an afternoon with friends or family.  Little kids played in sandboxes, chased each other around, and did cartwheels on the grass.  Teens and adults sat in groups on the grass or on benches in the shade, chatting or picnicking or reading.  I liked seeing Parisian families together.  So far I'd only seen people on their own heading to work or friend groups in twos and threes at cafes.  But here there were little kids and moms and dads.  It seemed like a nice way to spend a summer afternoon together.