March Is Here

You know that March is here when the weekly forecast contains sunny, high of 56 and rainy, low of 30. That's exactly the weather we've had in Paris this week, but I'm glad that we started with wet and cold and ended with sunshine. Not only that, we ended in style! Yesterday I went on a walking tour around the area of Mont Ste Genevieve.

Sainte Genevieve is important to the French because she not only discovered the tomb of St Denis, a very important early Christian martyr in France, but she also helped to protect the people of Paris during a long siege by the Huns. There are two churches right next to each other in this area of Mont Ste Genevieve, which is not really a mountain. It's just an elevated part of the city. You can find one church, named for the patron saint herself, that is a glorious mix of late Gothic and Renaissance architecture, and the other is famously not a church. That is to say, it's a mausoleum known as the Pantheon. It's interesting to imagine what the Pantheon might be if the Revolution hadn't happened. But I guess we'll never know. Now it's a very majestic home to important people after they have died. Eerie when you think about it, but so is the fact that the church houses the relic of Ste Genevieve's finger.

In the afternoon, I took my first real stroll on the Champs-Elysses. Honestly, I think that it will be prettier when spring really does arrive. The trees weren't in bloom, despite the deceptive weather. I also think that the only cool part is the view. Everywhere you are surrounded by wonderful 19th century buildings, all leading toward the Arc de Triomphe, which is the center of the spokes of the star (etoile).

I even ate a typical alsacien meal, that is a traditional menu of Alsace in the North of France. It mostly consisted of sausages and cabbage. To my taste buds, it felt more German and even smelled German and not French, but the funny thing about France is how truly different the regions are. In the South, or rather in Provence, everything felt and looked like Italy. In the North, you could have German influence or even something more akin to Great Britain. It's all relative to geography. I think what's truly wonderful about that fact is that France is a fraction of the size of Texas; it's even smaller than Georgia.

I hope to share more wonderful things with Americans in the future, but if you're considering coming here to France, you might just want to prepare yourself for how truly small this space is by remembering that even in Paris, there are more people in the space than such a small city has room to contain.