Cathédrale Chartre

Another wonderful day! We went on a field trip today instead of having class. We went to the Cathédrale Chartre. It was about an hour and a half train ride outside of Paris. I don't know if this is possible, but it may have been even more beautiful than Notre Dame in Paris. They were in the process of cleaning the inside and the outside of the cathedral, which you can see in the contrast between the white and the black walls in the picture. It looks amazing after it has been cleaned. It would be really interesting to see how the whole thing looks when they are finished cleaning it. Apparently while cleaning they have found that the stone used to be entirely painted in color during the middle ages. It wasn't always the dark gray that we see now. They showed us some sections that were a faint yellow, blue, red, and green. The stained-glass windows look incredible, but especially after they have been painted. They used to use the windows as teaching tools because the majority of the christians making pilgrimages to this cathedral could not read. Each of the windows tells a different story from the Bible. Our British tour guide spend an hour describing only a couple of windows on two of the faces of the cathedral. They told the story of Adam and Eve being sent out of the garden and of the Good Samaritan. It was interesting to see all of the little details that I would have never recognized myself. Like how at the bottom of the window there are images of the people who donated the money needed to build the window. One that we looked at had men making shoes at the bottom of it to signify shoemakers. Another had farmers. We followed the pilgrimage path around the ambulatory of the cathedral and looked in all of the side chapels and the different artwork and shrines. Unfortunately it has been very cold in France the last two days, so it was very cold inside of the cathedral and we didn't stay for as long as we would have liked. The outside is especially interesting because it represents both romanesque architecture and gothic architecture. The steeple on the right is romanesque and the one on the left is gothic. The cathedral experienced several catastrophic fires that resulted in it having to be rebuilt in several sections over the years. During one such fire the right steeple stayed up, but the left burned down, so they replaced it with a gothic steeple. We decided to walk around the outside even though it was very cold, and we saw the back of the cathedral and the view from behind it. It was incredible! The flying buttresses look amazing. After looking around the cathedral we walked around Chartre for a while. We went down some really pretty side streets and ate crepes and a baguette at a boulangerie/patisserie. We spent four hours in Chartre and then we took the train back to Paris and ate dinner at a cafe on a road next to the Champs-Elysées. It was too crowded to eat right on the Champs-Elysées. We saw the Arc de Triomphe right when we came out of the metro, but we didn't stay to look at it because it was too cold. We are going to go back next week to visit that and la tour eifel. I'm not exactly sure what it was that I ate for dinner. I put a picture of it on. It was fine, not my favorite, but I didn't understand what the words meant, so I just ordered it on a whim haha. Well I really hope it gets warmer because I want to be able to spend more time outside! But I am really loving my stay here! A bientot!