Day 2 - St. Chappelle and apartment hunting

woke up and out of the hostel by 8:45. lugged luggage down to the basement for safekeeping during the day and reserved a bed/mattress on the floor at the hostel for another night. plan was to walk and sketch notre dame and take the first tour of the day, but in trying to stay away from roads walked yesterday strayed a little further west. was fine, came on the centre pompidou from another angle right after buying an orange from the fresh produce stores that are everywhere, ate delicious citrus while staring at the building. still wasn't open yet, cleaning crews everywhere... The building definately comes as a shock after the rest of Paris. Paris is basically all old, close to the same design, with variations in the detailing, and uniformly dense. Even the parks are small and dense enough with trees that they don't really inturrupt. the large open paved... field running down a story to the opening is therefore a dramatic change, and feels unneccessarily abrupt. However, it was excellent to see the row houses from a straight-on perspective, impossible walking when walking down the streets. the inside-out, apparent jungle of thin spaceframed structure and huge, obvious, color-coded mechanicals forming the facades is a brassy shout to paris's pleased chatty whispers. in itself, quite impressive, neet, and all that. contrast very interesting, i don't know how it adds much to the paris dialoge except to throw it in sharp relief. i guess the comparison to the very visible vent stacks in rows on every building is much the same thing. I think I would need to see the inside to form a better opinion, the spaces looked fascinating, in a very mechanical way. um.... i wrote a ton in this post... time to crop :)

anyway, walking, up a little east of notre dame, crossed the river by the Chatele and it's angel-topped column/obelisk. come across the concierge, looks spiffy-official-old, and see the sign for duel entry, concierge and sainte-chappelle. ears perk up, as i ran across the picture in the guidebook and it looked like pure stained glass. the chapel itself is buried in the complex quite effectively, security checkpoint and all that. quite confusing, unhelpful signs. 7 euro entrance, to be waived next time if i come with proof of architecture studentry. chapel - gorgeous. presence of a base chapel suprises me, although i know all chapels are built on catacombs etc, but the columns and the cross-vaulting seem very delicate to me to support a chapel above. Beautiful painted columns, openwork on the walls (fake columns and other decorations to break up the mass) all patterned, textured, the gold castles stuck out a centimeter from the red columns, etc. beautiful, a little dark, but there are windows.
up a very very narrow flight of stairs to the main chapel. wow. very small floor area, very tall tall tall windows. the ration wall to window is maybe 1:4, and the wall is broken up in to sub columns, each colored differently, so it looks even smaller. gorgeous glass, wish it were sunnier, but they still glow like crazy. the old unrestored paintings in the trefoils quite intrigue me, all gory, can't figure out why there's so many torture of Jesus paintings, then I get told they're martyrs. go non-catholic me, shrug. each column has a different capitol, differnt angels, different apostles on the main ones. the variety and meticulous signs followed in the making of all these cathedrals will always amaze me i think. an effective bid for power i think. definately take the guided english tour; the lady i had was annoyingly drama-studentish, but lots of information communicated effectively, i could tell you the whole story again i would guess, but you should see it yourself. information/details on the stained glass, the structure, and all the history. i always knew the cathedral stained glass was bible scenes, but she "read" about 30 of the scenes in sequence, Judith's story. boring protestant bible, no interesting gory judith. there were well over 1000 scenes in the chapel stained glass. I was there for about 2 hours, pictures, sketching, and tour.
it had taken me 40 minutes to walk down from the hostel, i figured it should take me less to get to the much closer studio, but i was wrong. got... off track, not lost (well started out in entirely the wrong direction, figured it out quickly, but didn't quite reorient myself correctly i guess) got caught on a slightly-off street that just kept going and dumped me out quite a ways further west then i expected onto rue de lafayette, and therefore quite a ways further north. 20 minutes late, le sigh. tony was talking to the professors in the studio though, so i didn't feel quite as bad. tony's friend jack was with, and we went out for (excellent) crepes in a little place visible on a side street north of lafayete towards the opera... no name remembered, but the gnutella crepes? mmm........ get on metro to the american church, take pictures of listings and go right back to studio to look at the listings not in the cold and with a phone immediately available. several look promising, and we call several. i made tony call, probably not the nicest, but he really does know quite a bit more french then me. we get one appointment for "as soon as you can make it" and one for 7:30. also look at other listings, tony seems frustrated with this.
first apartment was up by the pigalle stop (found later in the guidebook as a red-light district, although it seemed quite normal to me, cute little streets etc) nice lady, nice rooms, wierd arrangement with her staying on her separate bed in the apartment once a week. we wanted it... for 450eu a month we thought it was an amazing deal. and so on and so on talking, her english was quite marginal, almost 45 minutes, and it's ours, she's going to call the other promised tenants and give it to us... and THEN it comes out that it's 450eu (plus utilities at 100 a month) a person... eh? quite a bit different i'd say. we pretty much gave it up right then, said we'd think about it. tryed to bargain, but we both had previously set limits of 450 a person anyway, and were now hoping for cheaper. ran away into the rain.
more apartment searching, second appointment called and said we could come as soon as we wanted. i went by myself, tony was waiting for his shopping friend Jack at some point, and wanted to keep looking. found the place easily (go very detailed maps - get a pocket by-street by-district paris book, they're the best) entry code, 7 flights of stairs (elevator's only broke once in the past year, and it's today...) the apartment is... nice. entryway with lots of 12"shelve storage with marble floor and walls (refer to plan) the kitchen is reached by stipping up 2 feet through the old windows, ugly little addition from the street, but very functional, nice windows, view of sacre-coure and opportunity to look down at the street - fun. chatty, nice nice 30yr old lady, from hawaii, half swiss. it was really easy for me to talk to her, and i had tony come by right away. slight drama with cash machines ::i recommend maxing out your debit card atm withdrawl limit the first couple days until you have enough cash to grab a place right away with 2-month caution (said cushion, means deposit) and first months rent, we almost didn't get this place. wee have apartment now, tony took off with jack, i talked online for a bit and chilled. felt a little lame, but it was already 8:30-9ish and i was really tired - the apartment hunting was quite stressful, although unexpectedly easy.
went back to hostel refreshed, found out i did indeed have a room/mattress on the floor for the night, went down, got pizza with one of two nice but stoner/drunk guys from virginia, brought it back to the pub, ate with two from first day instead due to lack of table space. talking with indian guy while the other two got ready, huge know-it-all but amusing to hear ramble pretentiously. walked to an african place for second supper/snacks, they were quite good - i don't usually like bready fruits like plantains etc, but these were ok.