Day 8

The first thing we did on day 8 was take the Metro to the Ile de la Cite where Paris started. We went to the Saint Chapelle church first. This was a church built by a French king to be a jewelry box for the crown of thorns Jesus wore when he was crucified. It has amazing stained glass windows that reach up towards the sky. Each large panel has stories from a certain part of the Bible (ex. the Resurrection, the book of Joshua, etc.) We enjoyed gazing up at the windows and marveling at their beauty. Next, we walked to Notre Dame. One of the cardinals of the Catholic church had passed away so they had a memorial set up for him inside the cathedral; so it was very busy when we were there. We had just enough time to go in and have an hour inside. It is amazing how big it is, it took over one hundred years to build it.
After our quick tour of Notre Dame we walked to our lunch at a restaurant where we ate in the wine cellar. Afterwards we walked through the Latin Quarter to get to the Cluny Museum. It is a museum of things from the Middle Ages. We saw stained glass windows, beautiful tapestries and lots of weapons. This is where our tour ended and we had some free time. We decided to walk back to Notre Dame to go to the top. We stood in line for two hours to get the chance to walk up the 400 stairs to get to the amazing views. We even got to see the huge bell, gargoyles, and the long line to get into the cathedral.
That evening we went to a concert at Saint Chapelle (the same church we went to in the morning). It was a concert with two violins, two violas, one cello, one bass and one harpischord. They did Adagios, and they also did Canon in D. It was beautiful to listen to the music in such an amazing setting. The acoustics were really good, too. There were only about 40 people in attendance, it was a very intimate setting. This ended up being one of our favorite things we got to do on our trip.