Chartres

Hey all,

Very sorry it has been so long since I got caught up – I have been feeling very guilty for not writing for so long – I kept meaning too but a combination of K and I being very busy, having a run of hotels and hostels where the FREE WIFI!! advertised turned out to be free if and only if you were prepared to do something like sit on the third step of the second floor fire escape with your head tilted to the right and rotated anti-clockwise – and finally, I was sick, first with the flu, then bronchitis, which more or less kept me in bed for over a week, then later in the piece with gastro, probably because I was run down and had been on antibiotics for the bronchitis for a combined total of about 3 weeks.

Anywho.  Here begins a bit of a catch up of K and my time together, which we have reconstructed from memory and photos, and a couple of draft posts that I wrote more or less when the events occurred, but did not manage to post.  I will keep catching them up over the next few days.

After Paris (where, looking for boots for me, a shop assistant told us ,“This floor is the more classy floor.  You probably want the other floor.”  I responded with “Are you saying I'm not classy?  Is that what you're saying?” which flustered her a little bit and made K laugh) we took the train to Chartres, which is one of the places I had wanted to see over here due to its (justifiably) famous cathedral.  Some random American chick we met at the train station (she lives here and teaches English) helped us find our hotel (a converted monastery which was, for a cheap place, lovely) where we spent first two nights, then booked another two.

The cathedral was glorious, inside and out – it is very difficult to get a sense of how stunning it is from photos – the combination of its scale and intricacy is difficult to photograph – I was not happy with any of the ones I took.  We went back there a few times, climbed the tower, took a guided tour of the crypts.  The stained glass is just stunning – they still have not managed to recreate one of the shades of blue uses – the only minor dissapointement was that the labyrinth was covered in chairs so I could not walk it – it is about 250 metres long from start to finish.  Also spent much time wandering around the town and doing things like drink coffee and smoke cigars – K loves it when I smoke cigars – encourages me to smoke more – enjoys nothing more than sitting outside in sub zero temperatures for an hour watching me smoke.

As compensation for enduring the Cigars we went to see a play, in French, which I allegedly slept all the way through, which is probably a bit of an exaggeration, although I may have nodded off for a moment or two.  In my defence, it was very warm inside the theatre, and the actress only had one facial expression, and it was in French.

But it was nice, after all my drama of getting out of Scotland and in to Paris, all K's drama with me not showing up at the airport and having to get herself and backpack taller than she is all the way to the hotel not knowing when I would finally show up (or if, given that the news over here was basically predicting the return of the Ice Age, if not Armageddon itself) – then rushing around trying to see all of Paris in about a day instead of five...  it was nice to spend a few days in one place just hanging out with each other and wandering around together doing not much but hold hands and look at things.

Photos.  1.  The cathedral rising over the town on one of K and my walks.  2.  Slightly blurry shot of K in the hall of the place we were staying.  3.  The labyrinth.  4.  One of the windows.  5 and 6.  The best two shots I could get of the architecture on the outside, that is, a sad comment on photography skills.  7.  Trying to give some sense of scale – that red dot in the centre of the shot is K.  8.  A little creature crawling down the side of the building when we climbed the bell tower.  9.  Another cathedral in Chartres, though not the one that it is famous for – fantastic clean example of how lovely the flying buttresses look.  K says it looks like an insect, which is sort of right: a big stone insect.  

Cheers, B.