Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame

This morning, I had class at the University. I feel like my French professor really beats the dead horse on almost every subject we cover. It seems like she unnecessarily drags things out just because she doesn't know what else to do in our three hour time slot. Today there was one multiple choice question on an exercise we were doing, and she went around and made every single person in the class give their opinion on which of the answers was correct and why. That's totally unnecessary. Three or four people's opinions would've sufficed, but instead we heard all fifteen. Pair that with the fact that we all talk extremely slow due to our limited vocabularies and you've got yourself a 40 minute discussion that could easily be settled in 2. Needless to say, today's class was extremely slow

After what felt like years, class was over and it was finally tiime for déjeuner. I headed home to make myself a sandwich, and I ran into my host "sister" Inès and her friends, who were on their way to have lunch in a park. Ten minutes later, I ran into Madame running errands and an hour after that, I ran into my host "brother" Geoffroy coming off the métro... today was truly the day for seeing my host family outside of the apartment. I made myself a ham, salami, and brie sandwich with a baguette from the bakery directly across my doorstep and it was awesome. Of course, when I was at the bakery getting the baguette, I spotted a pastry that looks exactly like the one I dreamed about on Sunday night, so obviously I had to get it. Also, six out of my last seven blog posts have had pastry pictures, so I realized that my faithful readers would be lost without a snapshot of my daily indulgences. *sigh* The things I do for you all... It was a mixture of raspberries, rasperry crème mousseline, and some other wonderful stuff, all wrapped up in a crêpe. Fan-freaking-tastic. It's probably bad news that these little creations are a mere ten feet from my doorstep at any given moment.

After lunch, I headed to Île de la Cité for my Paris by Site class. We walked around Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame and they were both gorgeous with beautiful vitraux. We happened to be inside Notre Dame when they were having mass, which I found really odd. They don't shut the doors of the church to tourists during mass, so there's hundreds of people walking around touring the church while a sermon is going on. I understand that they want to keep it open to the public for the whole day, but I feel like that would be extremely distracting for the priest and parishioners. I took a lot of pictures at each site which can be found at the end of this post :)   (click the pictures to enlarge them)

Monsieur and Geoffroy were both gone during dinner, so it was just me, Madame, Inès, and Diane. We started off with some store-bought salmon quiche thing. I'm not a big fan of salmon, but I toughed it out and told Madame it was delicious nonetheless. We then had some baked zucchini / potato pie thing that was actually delicious. Then, of course, salad, cheese, and dessert. I mentioned that sometime soon, I'd make them an American pancake dinner, and I think Madame told me not to make too much because they didn't want to be fat... I don't know if that was supposed to be a jab at American eating habits or not, but I just awkwardly laughed and said "haha okay".

Affecteusement,

Katie

St.Chapelle

St. Chapelle altar

Nave of Notre Dame

Votive Candles at Notre Dame

Notre Dame

Notre Dame