Catching My Breath

I got back home* from Scandinavia a little after noon on Sunday and I was pretty exhausted after travelling by myself, so I was really excited to take a nap in my own bed. On my way back I finally managed to figure out how I was going to get myself to Spain before my flight out of Madrid that I had already booked for Saturday. My rail pass ends on Wednesday, so I just needed to get to Madrid/Toledo by then at the latest, which is exactly when I'll get there. I have two trains all day Wednesday to get into Madrid, but for awhile it looked like I wouldn't make it at all, so I'm quite happy with those. However, that meant that I had Monday and Tuesday free to either relax and get myself organized for second semester or find a new, quick travel destination.

I couldn’t bear the thought of completely wasting those two days of my rail pass, so I took a day trip to Chartres. Since it’s only an hour from Paris and tickets were only 13E full price (free for me), Meghan came with me, so it was nice to have someone else with me. Why Chartres? Why for the world-renowned cathedral of course. The cathedral of Chartres is, I believe, the largest and second oldest Gothic cathedral in France (behind Notre Dame de Paris J) and has one of the most impressive collections of stained glass in the world. Four of the windows in the church survived a fire in 1164, so they are particularly impressive for their age. Another unique/famous aspect of the stained glass there is the quality/clarity/intensity of blue in the stained glass – at it was pretty impressive in person, I’d say. Oh, and the cathedral was one of the very first UNESCO World Heritage Sites – also where King Henry IV was crowned king of France.

On the whole, I’m glad we went, because it’s one of those places one ought to make sure to go if one spends a significant amount of time in Paris, but we picked kind of a miserable day to do it. It was a shaping up to be a gorgeous day in Paris as we were leaving (around 45 degrees, which feels like 60 when you have that kind of weather randomly in January), but when we got off the train in Chartres only an hour away, it was frigid. Taking a lengthy tour of the cathedral didn’t help warm us up either – I’m pretty sure it was colder in the damp, shaded cathedral than it was outside – you could definitely still see your breath inside. We also didn’t realize that because it was a) winter and b) a Tuesday that would mean that nearly everything else of interest in the town would be closed. So we spent about an hour in the cathedral, then at least an hour getting a hot lunch (soup and coffee) before heading pretty much straight back to the train station to catch a train back to Paris two hours earlier than we had originally planned.

*Paris really does feel like home at this point – especially when coming back from traveling in countries where I don’t speak the language even to the still somewhat limited extent that I speak French. Fun fact: based on days lived in the city, I’m pretty sure I’m officially more Parisian than Phoenician.