In Between

There were only two things I had to do on Wednesday.

One:

After the last month in Paris, I thought I could safely say I was over early, late, and flamboyant Gothic architectures.  Once you've seen one, you've seen them all, haven't you?  Maybe even a little exasperated by all the pomp and circumstance of the style, like "Yep, Luther happened". But Sainte Chapelle was like a kaleidoscope of floor to ceiling windows.  It was commissioned by Saint Louis who wanted a jewel box to house Christendom's most precious relics from Constantinople.  It's smaller than Chartres or Notre Dame, so it felt a little more intimate to me (if you can call the statues of the twelve disciples holding the implements of their destruction intimate).    

Two:

La Cantatrice Chauvre in the Latin Quarter.  There are no pictures.  Guilty admission: I fell asleep during the play.  Sorry.  I read  your stuff, Ionesco, but I was in post-Moroccan food/crepe stupor and couldn't do the mental double dutch that's your humor.  Poor guy.  He always seems to get the short end of the stick in my life, have you noticed?

I was too exhausted to do the theater thing because between that and Sainte Chapelle, I was busy having A Perfect Day.  

After Sainte Chapelle, Anna was in dire need of couscous and I was in dire need to vegetables.  We got wrangled into a quiet Moroccan restaurant with Australian tourists by a dashing and insistent server.  And this cat.  I love cats.

Cat-doration

We stopped by the Abbey Bookstore, but you've already heard about that fiasco, right?  

But all that got cleared up after we found out that the Velib' card that Anna found on the ground totally worked.  So off we biked into the renegade Parisian traffic.   We criss-crossed Paris, almost getting run over, forgetting about buses, happening upon old churches with watercolor-like stained glass I'd never seen before, homemade chocolate crepes, the secret garden behind Notre Dame, street musicians, bridges, baguette munching, and hilarious people watching (oh the amount of endearing, ridiculous things people do).

Here is where Wednesday ended:

Reading the best children's stories for adults by Shaun Tan out loud to each other in the artist's corner of Shakespeare and Co.  Every single one of his books, except one.  It was a collection of stories that are vulnerable, simple, and wholehearted and I bought it.  We didn't read all of them because we thought we should leave a little mystery for another time.  Anyway, after such a great day, I really felt like I was overflowing with gratitude and happiness.  I jotted this little ditty down before leaving that night and tacked it onto the wall of love notes: