Well, in a very serious and honest way, Paris should be a revelation to visitors at any time---it is one of the World's Great Places.
But for us, in 2005, at the height of el Busho's reign, Paris was one of our last stops before returning home from two months abroad, and every traveler that we'd met that had already been to Paris went to great lengths to share their stories.
Those stories painted Paris as a terror-zone: everybody was either rude or worse, and to not trust the locals, for their disdain for Dubya and Americans was well established.
When we arrived, our experience was so opposite to that description that we couldn't understand what all those travelers were doing to end up being treated like that. A hostel owner who spoke no English gave us metro passes because we were out of cash. Once leaving our metro in our hotel's neighborhood, locals stopped to help us navigate the streets. The restaurant we ate at that fist night gave us free drinks and free dessert. That was all the first day, after we were pretty sure we'd be sleeping in a park that first night.
We spent the four days we had in Paris seeing "The Sights."
We made our way one of those days to Ile de la Cite, after visiting a cafe for longer that we had planned, and did our tourist gig at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
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| Not a bad pic, but surely I took it |
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| Blurry pics and big doors |
Having survived a fire, the flames affect me in strange ways, and to see flames consuming the interior of an 850 year old architectural ventricle of one of the world's greatest cities, a space in my heart gets consumed by flames.
My camera at this time was a first or second generation digital apparatus, a freebie that came with a desktop computer. The indoor shots in low-light levels leave plenty to be desired, as can be seen here.
The Rose Window is mostly unknowable from this picture, but we were there and put eyes on it. I'm not sure if it remains.
A while back on this website I had a photo contest, where the winner got the following picture framed (both Dan and Norm won pictures):
It wasn't until this past Monday that I realized the sculpture was from Notre Dame.
One picture Corrie took we have framed and up in our house, a classic view from the "backside," one of the great photos in our possession, one that I will argue to keep up forever:
I'm still processing the fire and the destruction of much of the interior, but I'm not French, nor do I live in Paris, so my connection is vastly different from residences and the French in general.
