Day 24- Saturday 19 June

Wiped. Went to Chartres today, a relatively small town an hour's train ride southwest of Paris that had the small Eure River running through it. Took an uncrowded 8am train, arrived and took a tour of a stained glass museum/workshop that was great because it had real stained glass from different periods, medieval, Renaissance, contemporary, most of which had been removed prior to their original churches getting destroyed. Our guide gave a small demonstration of the production of a window, and even with modern techniques it takes forever- you draw out your design then cut it out, then cut the glass to correspond to the shapes, then paint it if you want, then fit it together with [real] lead strips, then solder it with tin, then fire it all, and voila! But it takes a fair while to cut the glass. After the museum, we went to the Cathedral Notre Dame de Chartres, because there are many Notre Dames, and our guide told us about how it used to look; they'd done restoration on the far end of the nave, and instead of the usual dark grey-brown stone it was almost white. He also showed us traces of paint around, so apparently being really clean-looking wasn't enough, but the entire inside was brightly painted. They're going to clean the rest of the interior stone, and will be done in five-ish years, and I can't imagine what it's going to look like. People mostly come to Chartres to see the original stained glass, and our guide talked us through in brief some of the saints' stories, some Bible parables and some windows depicting guilds, and then showed us some iconography used to identify the figures of the sculptures all over the outside. Pretty great overall.

Afterwards, the program director, another girl and I took a train-golf cart-thing through town and saw some more historic buildings, including houses from the seventeenth century, and the river. During the free time before the return train, I walked down by the Eure, which was pretty slow-moving and shallow but lined by houses and cafes and very picturesque; all of the houses are right by the water, and a lot used to be wash houses and have recessions where people used to take clothes down to the river. Old houses + green river + roses and everything else in bloom + not raining + no stress + swans = a nice walk. A large bit of Chartres is blocked off from cars, and this is all shopping, and today there was also a small crafts and flowers market, so I wandered in there for a while before catching a train back to Paris with the other students. Just got back from chilling in Parc Montsouris across the street, reading a bit of Dahl in French [since it's at my level], am now contemplating life.

Weird stuff about France: or sketchy: Certain money exchange places will happily take a copy of your passport, while others have told me that it's illegal. The former are mostly found on major streets. Funny stuff ... I don't know. Sorry.