Paris--Day 2, Part I--Sainte Chapelle, Notre Dame (almost), and Musee d'Orsay

Our second day in Paris was a very full day, so I'm going to break it up into two posts. In the morning, we headed off to Sainte Chapelle, a beautiful chapel near Notre Dame where the kings used to worship. It was once connected to the palace, but isn't any longer. There are two levels to the chapel, and people are always a little disappointed when they walk in. The first floor is pretty, but people usually hearing glowing reviews of the chapel, and the first floor is on par with other places they've visited. I have a not-so-good picture of this floor, and again, it's very pretty:

But then you walk upstairs (to the area where the king received mass), and you are just stunned by the beauty of the stained glass that goes basically from floor to ceiling on three of the four walls:



On the outside of the chapel, it seemed like they were doing some restoration work. Here's a pile of pieces they had collected:

After Sainte Chapelle, the plan was to tour Notre Dame. We ran into a bit of a snag when we found out it was actually closed that day because the Pope was in town and was going to speak at Notre Dame later that day! The Pope dogged our heels the rest of the day, creating small problems with sightseeing, but we were able to overcome them. (The most annoying was that they closed the subway stops close to Notre Dame earlier than advertised. At lunch, Ian had to leave early to meet the group, and I was going to catch up with him 15 minutes later with Sophie. To simplify things, since there are no escalators or elevators in all of the Paris subway system, Ian took the stroller. When I got to the subway station 15 minutes later with a very heavy Sophie, it was closed already, which meant that I had to walk with Sophie all the way to Musee d'Orsay. Luckily, I was able to catch Ian on his cell phone, and he met us half way with the stroller, but there's nothing like having to walk a mile with a 30-pound sack of potatoes!)

Anyway, I got a picture of the group figuring out when they could visit the inside of the famous cathedral:


Before lunch, Ian, Sophie, and I went to scout out the place we need to meet later that night for the boat tour. When we climbed the stairs from the subway, we found that there was a nice view of the Eiffel Tower...and this is where Sophie's love affair with the Tower started. (In fact, she built an Eiffel Tower this morning out of a cup, an empty paper towel tube and a plastic apple...)


After lunch, we finally made it to the Musee d'Orsay. Outside there are statues and giant reproductions of paintings, which Sophie found fascinating.


The Musee d'Orsay is located in an old train station. It's a beautiful, relaxing space for an art museum. This is the view from the restaurant:

A view of Sacre Coeur from the balcony:

A view of the Louvre (where you can see that it really was a palace at one time):

Here is Sophie pretending to sleep. The pretense didn't last long, as she once again fell asleep about 15 minutes into the visit and slept the entire time.

A couple of views of the museum space:


And finally, as a prelude to the next post, here is Sophie posing with her miniature Eiffel Tower, which she loved, but tragically dropped, and which was subsequently run over by the stroller and broken. She's looking forward to our next trip so that we can buy her a new one.