Kiddles 'N Bits: February 10

Day 41

With it being Sunday, we started our morning off by going to church. Church is not held in the typical chapel that we're used to back home. It was in the building shown below. Sacrament was held in a regular room and sunday school classes/primary were in a different section of building that you access by crossing a courtyard/parking area. Lucky for us, there must be enough visitors that frequent this ward because they had headphones for us to wear and a missionary that then translated everything (though it only worked half of the time). We only stayed for the sacrament meeting.

LDS church we attended in Paris

A short walk down from the church, we came upon this really cool old hotel. Unfortunately it looks like it's not being used any more.

Old hotel in Paris - Hotel Deville

Statue in front of the old hotel

Next we went to see the Notre Dame Cathedral. It was surprisingly busy. When we arrived, there was a line up of people to get in. Although, shortly after getting inside, we soon discovered that an actual worship service was starting (thus the reason why there was probably so many people). Although we just continued to walk around during their service, I must admit that the singing was extremely nice to listen to, especially in such a big cathedral. Of course, lots of detail in everything. And some strange statues. I look at a lot of the art and I often wonder why the artist made it that way. What's the story behind them? (In fact, I asked this question constantly throughout our entire Europe trip)

Notre Dame Cathedral

Some of the detail on the outside

Looking down the length

Stained glass

Worship service starting

An example of some statues that made me ask "why?". See the guy on the left, he's standing on a little man instead of a pedistal like the rest of them.

The doors to Notre Dame. Lots of detail.

Moving along. Next stop we went to the St. Sulpice church. This church was made famous mostly from the book/movie "The Davinchi Code" and it's reference to the "Rose Line". As much as I loved reading that book when it came out, I must admit that I couldn't remember the details for it to have any significance when we looked through this church.

St. Sulpice

The organ pipes

The gnomon - brass meridian line and obelisk

Moving along. We hopped on the metro. We visited what some locals dubbed "the second most romantic place in Paris, right after the Eiffel Tower". What location could it be?? A wall with "I love you" written in almost every language. Very cool.

Cam standing by the korean words

Of course, a geocache right beside the wall.

Walking a couple blocks down the road, we came to the Sacre Coeur Basilica. Very cool building. Not too long after we arrived here, it started to snow big giant snowflakes. Sorry, no pictures are allowed in the Sacre Coeur Basilica. I will say this though, this was the location of the most aggressive "street vendors", if you can call them that. One guy even grabbed hold of my wrist and wouldn't let go. So annoying.

The view, though it was starting to snow, so it wasn't the clearest.

After going through the Sacre Coeur Basilica, we went for a walk down the nearby streets and stopped in at the St.Pierre De Montmarte church (which was pretty well right beside the Sacre Coeur. What drew my attention to St.Pierre De Montmarte, was the fact that it had an awesome courtyard (full of statues and old tombstones) that we could see from the street, but unfortunately that part was closed off to the public. Bummer. Once again we saw police walking around carrying their machine-guns (have I mentioned that we saw the police and their big guns walking around all over Paris?)

We LOVED walking around the small streets here. Also, best shopping we saw in Paris (unfortunately, with it being Sunday, we unfortunately didn't purchase anything here... and that was hard to do!)

Street view of StPierre De Montmarte church

Inside StPierre De Montmarte

Afternoon snack. Crepes. Nutella is very popular in Europe!!

Taking a shortcut through some small streets to get back to the metro, we came across this little tiny courtyard park.

Before going down into the metro tunnels, we found there was another church (yes, we went through a lot of churches). So, we thought we would stop in and walk through it too before heading on.

St.Jean De Montmarte church

Interesting pictures in this church. Lots of skulls and crossbones.

We had a little more time left in our day, so before heading back to our hotel, we decided to take the metro and go see the Arc de Triomphe.

Detail on the side

Crazy driving! No marked lines. Just drive in the right direction and don't get in an accident. Once again, so glad that we weren't driving in this country.

Well, our day had come to an end. It was time to head to the train station, where we were to take a sleeper train to Rome, Italy. What started out as something fun, ended up being not so much fun when we discovered that our section of train had no power, which meant no lights and no heat. It was a very long 16 hour train ride. I had packed small flashlights (which was intended for night-time caching), which ended up being convenient to use as half of our trip was through tunnels and then it truly was pitch black.