Church and State

A nice day. The sun came out and hung around all day. We took the Metro and RER to the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Denis in the suburb of Saint-Denis. It has been there since the 7th century and is the burial place of many of France's kings. It was interesting to visit a suburb of Paris, a place that is very much different from USA's suburbs, populated by immigrants, and very many unemployed folk.

From the old church we walked to a very modern soccer stadium, the national stadium and site of the 1998 World Cup final, Stade de France. We were able visit the stadium, but didn't tour the playing field area.

On our way to dinner we stopped by Eglise Saint-Eustache, a place we visited several times last year. Here I'm standing by the Henri Miller created "L'ecoute," a face and hand sculpture, which is located in the courtyard. I was standing among some of the other crowd in the area..

After dinner we went by the courtyard outside of Notre Dame, just to see what was happening. There was a lot of activity, especially street performers. One of the groups was made up of a couple of guys jumping over a stick propped about 10 feet in the air, while wearing roller skates. They were very daring and quite good. This guy didn't quite make it on this jump, but was successful on his next attempt. He jumped without a net or pads, but landed on his feet every time. They passed a hat and I gave him some part of a Euro. Gino gave up one of his silver dollars.

And there was a beautiful sunset over downtown Paris.