Christmas concert and the first installment of France photos

So on the day of Christmas Eve, I woke up around 5:30 and started standing in line outside King's College Chapel at 6:30 to be admitted to the chapel at 2 in the afternoon and hear the choral concert/Christmas church service. Waiting in line wasn't too bad because the day wasn't too cold I had about half a dozen other people to wait with and I could periodically leave to go get hot cocoa from the cafe at King's College.
The concert was broadcast live by the BBC, so there were lots of notes in the programs about how people shouldn't cough unless absolutely necessary. Also, children under I think 5 or 6 years old were not allowed in and there was a lengthy notice about why having small children along for the concert would be inappropriate and probably cause noise during the taping.
The King's College Choir was very good, but unfortunately a lot of the carols were unfamiliar to me. Further, there are new carols commissioned to be written for the concert every year. The little pamphlets we were given at the beginning of the service had all the lyrics, and one of the new carols, called "Mary" had some seriously bizarre lyrics. Here's the first stanza:

"The night when she first gave birth
Had been cold. But in later years
She quite forgot
The frost in the dingy beams and the smoking stove
And the spasms of the afterbirth at dawn.
But above all she forgot the bitter shame
Common among the poor
Of having no privacy.
That was why in later years it became a holiday for all."

What?
I'm glad that I saw this because I was curious, but I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed by it.

Anyway, enough about weird Christmas carols. Here's some photos from the first full day on my trip to France.
The previous day, we arrived at Charles de Gaul airport and took the train into Paris. To be honest, the hardest part about going from Cambridge to Paris was coping with the coach ride to London Luton airport. The coach driver wasn't announcing the stops. At the first stop in the Luton area, I wasn't sure if it was the stop for the airport or not, so I got out and asked the driver as he was helping some new passengers onto the bus. He just looked blankly at me the first two times I asked and then when I asked again if the bus continued to a stop that was closer to the airport, he told me he didn't know. How could the driver of the coach not KNOW where the coach is going! It was really frustrating. Then I realized that maybe he thought I was just some random person bothering him. I said "I'm on the coach right now. I want to know if this is the right stop for the Luton airport." "Oh," he said, "where are you going?" "The Luton airport," I said, attempting to remain polite. He said "Oh, it's the next stop." It was like pulling teeth.
In general I found people in France to be nicer and more understandable in French than I find people in the UK in English. One of my friends pointed out that in the UK, people have a stronger tendency to think you should know what they're talking about because you speak English, so it's often really hard to get British people to understand your questions.

We stayed that first night in a nice hostel in Montmartre, which is a neighborhood in the north where Amelie is supposed to live in the movie Amelie.
We started the next day by spending the morning in Montmartre, particularly by seeing the Sacre Coeur basilica. We climbed to the top, backpacks and all. This is a view from the front:


We also saw a lot of the rest of Montmartre, including the small vineyard it contains, the outside of a smaller church in the area, St. Pierre, and some of the windmills that the area is famous for. In particular, we went and saw the outside of the nightclub/dance hall which shares its name with a movie, the Moulin Rouge (translation: red windmill). Here it is:

Next, Sandra and I took the metro out to Trocadero, which is a big park and a few museums:
And from Trocadero it's possible to see...

It was a rather foggy day. Since it was cold we decided not to go up into the Eiffel Tower. Instead, we walked through the Champ de Mars, past the Ecole Militaire and to the closest metro station, where we took the next train to the Musee D'Orsay.

This museum is particularly known for its collection of Impressionist paintings and, in general works from before and after that time. When I visited there was an exhibition with Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe as well as a lot of sketches and paintings by Picasso which are studies on this painting by Manet.

Some other cool stuff I got to see includes a bunch of Monet's pastels of the exterior of Rouen cathedral, including the one below:

There were also several very recognizable works by Van Gogh, including The Bedroom and this self-portrait:

After looking around the Musee D'Orsay, we went over to the Louvre. It turns out that on Fridays the Louvre is open free to people under 26 from 6 pm to 9 pm, so we got in free. Yay!

Here's one of my favorite works in the Louvre, Winged Victory of Samothrace:

The Louvre is way too large to walk around the whole thing over the course of just a couple of hours, so we saw the Mona Lisa and then walked through the Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia areas and then went to the metro. That night we took a late train out to Metz and then to see Alex. More about that in my next post!

We managed to see an incredibly large number of different things that first day in Paris. I think that it would have been completely impossible during the summer when the peak tourist season is, but in mid-December all of the big tourist draws were remarkably quiet and sane. There were still a number of other tourists around, but the metro and the museums were mostly full of Parisians.