Notre Dame & Ile de la Cite

   So where does one start a tour in Paris given its size and sooo many amazing sites up its snail-eating , frog-leg chomping Gallic sleeve?

  Well, there just so happens to be a "quasi"- centre to Paris (and that soon to be explained pun was truly unintended!)
  Place Parvis situated in front of the worlds greatest Gothic Cathedral, Notre Dame("Our Lady") is the point from which all distances (Point Zero) in the French Empire (oops,pardon mois Monsieur Napolean - REPUBLIC) are measured. Situated right on the larger of two of Paris' islands, Ile de la Cite and considered to be the ancestral home of those crazy, hip ,fun loving, sun-worshipping Lutetians! Well fun-loving until Julius and his Romans (a kind of large pre-Christ boy-band with Justin Bieber-like hair-styles that was VERY organised!) crashed their party!

   So. What makes a Gothic cathedral, Gothic? Apart from its uber-use of black eye-liner, black finger-nail polish and sullen anti-social attitude?! And apart from Marilyn Manson what makes "Our Lady" THE most famous Goth around....er...I mean Gothic Cathedral around! Well she's kind of been around for quite a while (and a gentleman should never mention how old a lady is. Suffice to say that she started her ~90year  building programme about a century and a half AFTER the last party poppers had been swept away and Auld Lang Syne songs faded into the distance from drunk revellers at the 999 Millenium celebrations! "Tonight we're gonna party like it's 9-99..." Hmmm doesn't seem to have quite the same ring as the "Great Purple one's" rendition ~1000 years later!!)

  So - Gothic! Lets summarise! Towers reaching high up to be as close to the main-man of the moment as possible (that would be God), lots of stained-glass windows telling fab stories from the Bible (let's face it almost 1000 years ago not too many folks were adept at the old 3R's!And not too many understood the "enthralling"(!) Latin masses either so they learnt the Bible through the depictions in the amazing stained-glass windows!)

   Gargoyles  - beastly looking fellas used to scare away evil spirits (or scare off drunken locals drinking evil spirits!) as well as (and this one is great during a torrential downpour) - steering rainwater away from the sides of the building to prevent erosion by "convulsing" it out of their mouths!!(A sight that is not too uncommonly performed outside O'Sullivans bar next to Moulin Rouge by tourists most nights I might add! And we all know which tour company they were probably travelling with don't we haha!)

  To continue! Vaulted ceilings,pointed archways and tentacle-like flying buttresses on the outside to support the building and all its windows ('cause lets face it, from an engineering point of view, glass as a support ain't that strong!!) Throw in heaps of detailed statues of apostles,saints,Kings of Leon...umm,..I mean Judea! And even one be-headed martyr made the cut (sorry - pun intended!But we'll get to Saint Denis at a later stage!) Add a pinch of controversy like massacres of 1000's of Protestants, a dash of a cocky little would-be Emperor crowning himself in front of the Pope and top it off with the piece d'resistance - the legend of a gruesome doubled-over lil bloke who rang the bells and fell in love with a prostitute - no not yours truly but Quasimodo of hunchback fame! And there you 'ave it Madames et Monsieurs - the worlds greatest Gothic cathedral!

 Oh and though there's still a billion things to mention on this crazy Goth I will sign off with two pieces of trivia: In the photo at left of but a few of her gargoyles you will notice most have dragon/serpent heads except for the one in the middle wearing a....workers helmet!! I know the trade unions can be kind of scary sometimes but its an interesting effigy! As legend would have it, one of the disgruntled stonemasons during its construction didn't quite warm to his boss (many of us can probably sympathise with that!) and decided to carve his boss's face with helmet as a gargoyle! Not sure if he got that end of year bonus!

   Secondly , the word Goth! Well, the Goths, again, were not some hip new boy-band with synchronised dance moves and trendy haircuts (many will contend that point!). They were in fact those rather marauding, axe-wielding types from the Germanic regions who would kill first and ask questions later. They seemed to have a kind of large-ish input into the sacking of the Roman Empire by the end of the 300s! They were considered by the elite to be not the classiest or cultured of peoples (consider them a bit like the trailer-park trash of the AD 400s!) Basically it was by the 1500s that anything that was considered rude or barbaric was labelled Gothic!As this latest craze of architecture took off, the purists that loved the classical style labelled this new fad as "Gothic" -"architecture that only a Goth could love!" Anyway these days I'll bet Marilyn Manson isn't alone in loving it i'm sure!

A la prochaine!!