Chartres

We had our USC group visit to Chartres yesterday. It’s a town outside of Paris known for having the best preserved Gothic cathedral in Europe, the Notre-Dame Cathédrale de Chartres. The cathedral is also famous because it claims to possess a holy garment worn by the Virgin Mary. The cathedral looks a lot like the Notre Dame in Paris but much grander, with 163 stained glass windows.

Before touring the cathedral, we walked around the town and browsed the outdoor market. It was so cold though, even colder than Paris, that is was hard to really enjoy. For lunch, we ate at a traditional French restaurant called l’Estocade for a three-course meal, courtesy of our school. For the entrée (appetizer) I had a puff-pastry tart with cheese, tomatoes, and tuna fish (not the canned stuff, but real cooked fish). For the plat (main course) I had a gratin of onions and cod. I had to have two fish things because the rest of the options had meat in them, but they were different and both delicious. My dessert wasn’t what I expected, but it was alright because I was so full by that point that I couldn’t have ate it anyways. It was translated as a “butter cake” but it was nothing like that. It was an egg-y cake with cooked plums… kind of like bread pudding minus the bread. And it was served cold. I wasn’t impressed.

After lunch we were all so full and cold that we just wanted to go to sleep, but we still had to visit the cathedral. We had a guided tour with the historian Malcolm Miller, who is the renowned expert of the cathedral and has been giving tours for 50 years. He kind of reminded me of the British expert historian in the Da Vinci Code because he was also British but obviously a Francophone. The tour was very insightful and the cathedral was beautiful.

It was a pretty long day, so when we returned to Paris we just all went back to our homes to rest. Later that night I met up with some of the girls in the Bastille area. We just walked around for a while, and then went to a placed called Le Paradis du Fruit. It’s a café that specializes in exotic fruit cocktails and desserts. I shared an ice cream sundae with Allison. It had vanilla bean and nougat ice cream, caramel sauce, caramelized nuts and whipped cream. It was amazing and huge! I rationalized it because I didn’t eat my dessert at lunch and I didn’t eat dinner since lunch was so big… there are just too many tantalizing sweets in Paris!

Le cathedrale de Chartres