DAY 8- Notre Dame and Left Bank, June 9th 2014

 Jeez, its June 15th, only a week behind on the freaking Blog........


Went down to the river (Seine) to see Notre Dame cathedral

One of the so called high Gothic cathedrals, “high” because they are so darn huge with towering towers and flying buttrii and quadripartite vaulted ceilings that are so way, way up there, that you yourself tend to get “high” when staring upward so much as in a rare form of airsickness.

Back on the ground, we cross the "bridge of locks" where one sees thousands of locks attached to bridge railings. "The Pont des Arts bridge over the Seine River is a popular tourist destination where couples declare their undying love for each other by writing their initials on a padlock, fastening it onto the bridge, and throwing the key into the water below."

That is so romantic and also sounds sorta dangerous. What about dead load people? In fact last Sunday evening a section of bridge railing collapsed (more like fell over) under the weight of all the locks. Thanks to Tom for that tidbit!



 
Now that we have safely crossed the scary bridge we are on the Left Bank which is not the Right Bank obviously. Not sure how the left and right banks were determined but the Left Bank is on the south side of Paris and historically was considered the Paris of artists, writers and philosophers. Can you say "Lefty"?

One of the places the Leftys may have hung out was the Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, which we couldn't get into because of the long line....never seen a line for a bookstore except for that time in Nashville when Ted Nugent was autographing his cook book "Kill It and Grill It". He is decidely not a Lefty. But, I digress.

Next is a very impressive statue of archangel Saint Michel slaying some demon. It is huge in scale, measuring 26 meters high and 15 meters wide (85 x 49 ft). The statue was dedicated in 1860 around the time when demons were slowly being replaced by Leftys.














 
Finally, practically down the street past some medieval looking ruins and then the Sorbonne (Lefty central-Google Sorbonne, May 1968), we come to the Paris version of the Pantheon, an early example of neoclassicism, with a façade modeled on the original Pantheon in Rome. It is currently undergoing a 10 year renovation.













Prof. Taze drags us around to a few more sights until everyone is burnt. Did I mention that Prof. Taze's wife, 3 sons, and mother-in-law are along for the trip? Talk about fool-hardy and misadventurous. But our roving gang of Architects and Landscape Architects stick together and never back down from fool-hardy misadventures.