Up Yours France

First impressions of Tokyo: infinite in all directions

“So Leah, what is there to do in this deadbeat town?” I asked as our taxi drove through the crooked, brightly lit and phenomenally crowded streets of Shinjuku. “Because, let’s be honest, right now it looks pretty dead”.

The grey skies and intermittent rain had done little to stem the tide of humanity as it swept through one of Japan’s most densely populated districts as locals and tourists wandered streets, food vendors shouted at passers plying their wares and five story shoe stores did a roaring trade in the floors overhead.

We had arrived by Shinkansen from Kyoto earlier in the afternoon. Our bullet train wove through a mishmash of skyscrapers before we arrived in the middle of the city at Tokyo Station. At that point we noticed it was eerily quiet at 4pm in one of the busiest train stations in the world. Then we heard it. It started with the scuffing of shoes on tiled footpaths but soon it was a thunderous stampede as an enormous mass of suited and tied commuters rounded a corner.

It seemed like everyone in the city had finished work in an instant all descending on the one train station in what I thought would be our last seconds of life as thousands of people barrelled towards us but the effect was remarkably and completely predictably civilised. Millions of people travel by subway everyday but it never reaches the levels of chaos we’ve experienced in London or Paris. I can put this down to one reason: everyone seems to know where they’re going, how to get there and how long it will take. Confused travellers are not tolerated. Presumably because I couldn’t find one. Thankfully we found someone who could speak English well enough to put us on a train heading in more or less the right direction.

After our taxi ride through Shinjuku we checked into our hotel and joined the throng on the streets where the vendors could obviously sense that ours was a hunger that only foreign, suspicious-looking food could extinguish. We were in and out of shops and cafe’s for hours before we decided that the night was ripe for exploration so we wandered over the road, back into the post-modern dislocating labyrinth of Shinjuku Station to board a train to Roppongi and Tokyo Tower. We were on our way to check out the city lights through the rain and see our new home-base from the best vantage point in the city.

We walked out of one of a billion exits at Roppongi and saw the Tokyo Tower staring straight back at us, glowing a vibrant orange as the Tower lit the drizzle as it fell against the darkness on the wet spring evening. We followed its beacon and eventually found ourselves at its feet before purchasing out tickets and zooming up 160 metres to the first observation deck. Even heaped with a heavy coating of rain the city is vivacious and bold, but the thing that stood out most to me was its boundlessness. Tokyo. Just. Goes. It pulses and spreads its vibrance and dynamism in all directions. It doesn’t end. Here is an amazing sight for a newcomer to the city.

The rain, swept by strong winds, lashed the screens from in front of us but it didn’t obscure the views of row upon disjointed buildings, elevated roadways, enumerate bridges, shimmering harbours and dauntless skyscrapers each marking their peaks with glowing red beacons. At this relatively low height, however, everything seems to be behind everything else. For the best view, you have to go higher.

So for an additional fee, we travelled up the Special Observatory elevator which rocketed us up to the tallest deck at 250 metres.

This really added perspective. At this height you feel further away from everything but your vision is unobscured and everything seems to be right there. The Rainbow Bridge was so close you feel you could walk across it, Roppongi Hills was a mere rope-swing away. But remaining is the incredible endlessness of the city. This is something that you might think may be solved by daylight, but you’d be wrong as the sun simply provides further scope for the sprawl making the city feel that much more impressive.

After a short stay at the top we were moved along as the observatory closed for the evening. We headed back to the madness of Shinjuku Station and its dislocationism and resident heaving masses.

We were not 12 hours into our stay and Tokyo had already dismantled all of my preconceived notions and blown apart my concept of infinity. Alright Tokyo, what else you got?

It’s a Hell of a town

Two weeks in Japan spoilt us. In every restaurant we sat down in vibrant, immaculately groomed and softly spoken staff couldn’t wait to bow at us, bring us mountains of food and enormous beers (serious litre bottles, enormous). At theme parks they were bursting with delight at the chance of taking photos for us while taxi drivers were chomping at the bit at the inclination to offer us directions to everywhere, in English, for nothing.

In Canada, aside from one unscrupulous taxi driver, things were much the same. Nice people doing everything for you. No tip? No problem.

Then we got to New York City and everything changed.

Gone were the smiling faces and helpful tips. Here everyone gets a cut. You want to buy a week ticket for the bus, you have to go through three people, all of whom don’t give a shit (or change for that matter) they just want their slice of your overpriced pie.

You want to ask for directions from anyone “fawgadaboudit”, that’ll cost ya. If you ain’t paying or even if you’ve already paid, they don’t care!

Perhaps it’s a behaviour native to massive Western metropolises like New York, London, Rome and the like. These cities are two things: 1) enormous, and 2) teeming with tourists. Importantly, the fact that there are always tourists around means that it doesn’t matter how badly you are treated, if you decide to leave, there is always someone right behind you to take your place.

These are wonderful, beautiful and fascinating places to visit but if you’re going expecting to visit Rome and, let’s say, not be yelled at by mustachioed shopkeepers for having incorrect change when buying a coke, you may come away disappointed.

In New York, it was at its most obvious at the Empire State Building. We noticed that this landmark of American ingenuity has ‘employees’ but lacks ‘workers’. There did not seem to be a single person doing anything at all. They stood at elevator doors looking on the punters with contempt while loudly and descriptively discussing the roundness of Lindsay Lohan’s breasts and the firmness of her undercarriage, among other things. I heard one employee loudly proclaim “Scarface is the greatest story every told” and while I completely agree with him I doubt the need of his colleague on the other side of the building to hear it while a woman carrying a formerly sleeping child was walking by. I think he may have thought we were all French. Which would have made everything ok, because, well, “Up Yours France,” etc.

By day four, I had had enough.

We had breakfast at Subway in the mall underneath Rockefeller Centre. From the moment we walked in the girl behind the counter was talking on her iPhone to her friend about her ‘beau’ and his ‘shit’. I’ll never forget the contempt with which she handled my bacon. And she treated my salads like it had attacked her mother with a machete. When she was done she pointed to the screen to indicate the price. It was unbelievable. Leah and I made a giant mess and left. As we walked away we could hear her yelling at us “Wut da fug, put yo sh-…” etc. I think that was the first thing she said to us. She’s lucky I lacked the inclination to recreate an infamous McMirror incident on her salad bar!

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This was obviously a side-note to an otherwise incredible five days we spent in NYC and we met a lot of really cool people as well. If manners isn’t quite the city’s strong-suit then being a battery-pack for the universe certainly is. The rush you get from walking through Central Park or Times Square is worth every cent you spend in this remarkable place. Don’t let the narrow experiences of a guy focusing on the negatives for the sake of something to write about throw you off!

Note: I’ve since been informed that New Yorkers get a bad rap due to the hospitality workers and such who bus in from Long Island and New Jersey (shudder) everyday stinking of garlic and generally being assholes.

Note 2: Apparently NYC is currently ranked as America’s second rudest city but there is a campaign under way to restore the Big Apple to its rightful place at the top of the pile. Here: http://rudenyc.tumblr.com/

Empire State Building

The oft photographed art-deco piece glistened off the marble floor as we stepped off the street into the grand foyer of the Empire State Building. We had been within eye-shot of the building as for what seemed like hours as we followed its beacon along New York City side-walks but as we turned off Broadway at Herald Square, only a city block of 34^th Street stood between us and the top of the world’s grandest skyline.

In a dismaying departure from what I’ve seen in the films, patrons cannot walk in off the street, jump straight into an elevator and hit every floor on the board. First they need you to wait… wait and pay… twice. We were quickly ushered through a deserted maze of a ticket line, through a metal detector and up flights of stairs. We were lucky. With the amount of room dedicated to queue space with velvet ropes doubling back in massive halls dozens of times, some people must wait long hours in the peak season. However, with the humid, overcast weather keeping the crowds at bay, we were through in good time and it wasn’t long until we were in the elevator on our way to the 86^th floor.

Climbing up in the lift but you can never tell how high you actually are until you walk out on the deck. Even with the overcast weather and the hazy horizon, it is impossible to overstate the excitement I felt at standing at the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building. You are 86 stories up on one of the most iconic buildings in the world with all of the magic and romance that entails as you stare through the grill at one of the world’s greatest cities beneath you. The view is something I have seen 100s of times before in photos taken by the millions that came before but the vast expanse of the island of Manhattan and greater New York City is obviously lost in translation. The building itself may be a masterpiece of art deco architecture and its view is a masterpiece of city planning. In all directions there is another structure representing another era of New York’s dazzling history.

There is a lot to be seen from this vantage point. Looking downtown, the financial sector of Wall Street rises like a behemoth out of the lower rising department stores of Soho, dominating the skyline. The Flatiron building stands out in the foreground as Broadway cleaves it in two, giving the building its trademark shape. To the left is Chelsea and the right the infamous Hell’s Kitchen. On the other side you see the entertainment district around 42^nd Street with Broadway burning it’s course through Times Square like a renegade, dissecting the entire city, the only street not on the grid. It’s a breathtaking site framed by yet more skyscrapers given breadth by the grandiosity of Rockefeller Centre and Central Park in the background.

However, the tragedy of this observation deck is that it cannot offer the best view in the City because no matter which direction you look, the Empire State Building is not in it. For many people, this building is New York. There is no other skyscraper in the world that is so well known for the city that built it. It is a symbol of American prosperity and ingenuity from a period of poverty. It gave the City’s people hope for the future as they climbed out of the Wall Street Crash and into the Great Depression of the 1930s. Even during the days of high crime and seedy streets in the 70s and 80s, the building was a constant reminder of what a great City is capable of.

The wind started to pick up and swept rain onto the observation deck. Our time was up. We headed back down to the ground floor and started the 20 block walk (with the umbrella up) back to Times Square to catch our bus to Brooklyn.

As twilight descended on our second day in the city we stepped into the elevator at Rockerfeller Centre to the Top Of The Rock. Looking downtown at just the right moment, the sun catches the Empire State as it rises out of those middle streets casting an enormous shadow over New York’s lesser monuments stretching all the way to the Hudson River. The tower looms over the skyline and as its summer lights appear on the spire and the sunset gives way to the night, it appears as it’s visionary creators had intended: Imperial.

Dachau

“Arbeit Macht Frei” – Freedom Through Work.

It was silent except for the crunch of gravel underfoot as we passed through the gate and glanced up at the sign amongst the wrought iron bars. “Arbeit Macht Frei”. We were in the central courtyard or assembly area surrounded by uninspired buildings so unassuming in their architecture that if we weren’t aware of their history could have been anywhere. However, we knew that this was a place with a past as morbid and evil as any on Planet Earth.

This was the concentration camp of Dachau, a small village outside Munich, Ground Zero for the Third Reich’s vast network of camps built throughout Europe to harbour political prisoners numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Nearly 40,000 of whom, mostly Jews, met their ends here, either at the end of a rifle or from disease, suicide or asphyxiation in the gas chambers.


In the morbid game of ‘most deadly’, Dachau doesn’t register as a Death Camp in the same vein as Auschwitz Birkanau and Chelmno but this is where it began. This was the prototype. The test subject. Everything that happened at other concentration camps happened here, on a smaller experimental scale. This was the design on which all other concentration and extermination camps would be modelled.

To our right was the visitors centre where we were ushered through a museum style series of exhibits telling the story of the camp. The detail is devastating. Ruthless torture and indiscriminate murder wrought by Hitler’s hand-picked SS troops from 1933 to 1945. Unlike the rhetoric of some world leaders, the museum never attempts to minimise this. It spells it out in all too graphic detail with images, video and interviews with primary sources pasted across the room which once harboured administrative workers of the camp as they documented their atrocities.

Too traumatising to read everything, some often repeated words stood out and demanded your attention at each mention. Torture. Death. Genocide. And here was where it began. It takes more than a moment to comprehend the magnitude of this and longer still to start breathing again once it’s sunk in.

Looking through the photographs of the inhumanity demonstrated here, at the barbaric living conditions, pointless punishments and the constant threat of death it is impossible to not be affected in some way. The monstrosity of these crimes is too great. Some cry. Some shudder at each turn in every exhibit.

I stepped outside and was paralysed with chills as I stared at the memorial in the courtyard. The ghoulish black mesh of twisted, dislocated human bodies on a grid. I looked at it for a long time trying to take in what was completely impossible to grasp.

There, on concrete wall written in five different languages were the words “Never Again”.

I stood there in the 35 degree heat under Munich’s searing sun as chills coursed up and down my spine.

Churchill’s War Rooms (cont.)

“If the storm is to renew itself, London will be ready. London will not flinch. London can take it again!” - Winston Churchill, speaking from his underground Cabinet War Rooms, July 14, 1941.

You can walk anywhere in London. It’s a fact and one that most people miss. From Zones 1 to 3, everywhere is within walking distance. If you’re up for it. On this particular day, after a week of unsuccessful job searching in a depressed market, I was definitely up for it. So after a sobering morning tour of the Imperial War Museum and feeling energetic in the cold October breeze of one of London’s typically grey misty days, I walked from Lambeth past Waterloo, over the Westminster bridge and after milling through Whitehall fumbling with an A to Z, I finally found myself outside of that unassuming door that had so peaked my interest months ago. Finally there it was, the same entrance with the same sign posted above it. Pleased with my navigation skills, I hurriedly headed inside eager to explore the labyrinth within.

I had studied Churchill in school and done assignments on his political life - much to the pride of my father - and so I was engaged from the moment I set foot into the rooms located two stories under the busy side-walks of Whitehall. It was here that Churchill spent many of his own ‘finest hours’ and where he fashioned his persona as the portly, cigar-puffing, bowler hat-wearing, often inspirational leader. Although reportedly a tyrant to staff and colleagues, this is where Churchill, the Prime Minister became Churchill, the Warlord.

The bunker is a warren of map and communication rooms, cabinet meeting rooms, cramped sleeping quarters and sitting rooms, all with creepy mannequins manning the displays secured behind glass. The war rooms and most famously the map room are entirely preserved just as they were during the darkest days of the 20^th Century. Studying the maps you can chart the course of history with each of the many thousands of pinpricks denoting a single change in front lines over nearly six years of warfare.

The museum is the newest addition to the complex and is located in a single large room split into five sections covering Churchill’s life but focusing on the all-important years as the Prime Minister with the stiff upper lip and inspirational oratory skills which inspired the ‘London can take it’ attitude during the sleepless nights of the Blitz. Of course, for Churchill enthusiasts (yes, that is a thing) attention has been paid to his early life in the military in India and Africa and his early political career.

It was towards the end of the day and I hadn’t even covered two thirds of the museum as I noticed that there was nobody else in any of the rooms I was wandering through. A bemused staff member found me and asked me to ‘move along’ as the museum and war rooms were now closed so I hurried off back into the labyrinth of rooms desperate to get my money’s worth and explore what I could in the five or so minutes I could avoid being thrown out for. As I wandered down deserted halls amongst mannequins shouldering telephones and pushing pins into maps, I noticed that the hallways were equipped with hidden speakers reproducing an array of eerie pre-recorded sounds. Every now and then there was the sudden approach of hurried footsteps rising and fading, anxious whispers, high pitched yelling, far off laughing and every so often the muffled ring of a bell. More than a little unsettling, this was positively terrifying. When you are alone in a dully lit corridor two stories underground looking at lifeless statues with no eyes barking orders at invisible staffers, you can be forgiven for making a sharpish dash or the door.

I walked out of the bunker into the fog and drizzle of another night in the capital having spent three hours in the city’s most fascinating of chambers. I hadn’t even seen half of it. I felt strangely compelled to go back the next day, but as it happened the prospect of employment intervened and my plans were rightly cut off. It was better this way though. If I was to head back and do the war rooms for a second time I wouldn’t have cause to visit again when I return to this magnificent city when I’m old.

Churchill’s War Rooms

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour’.“ - Winston Churchill, June 18, 1940.

We were four days into our life in London and we had caught up with a very animated tour guide (and presumably also a frustrated actor) in the midst of giving a dramatic tour of Royal London from Wellington Arch and Buckingham Palace, through Westminster and finally down Whitehall to the seat of the United Kingdom’s parliamentary power. We ambled down the well manicured streets of Whitehall past the Prime Minister’s fenced-off residence on Downing Street. About two blocks from the PM’s security patrol we came to stop in front of a secluded double-door entrance with a small but very familiar name sign-posted above it.

The Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. Through these doors and down several iron staircases lay the network of bunkers in which Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his ministers and his small army of staffers strategically planned the allied victory of World War II. This was something I had to see. But not wanting to appear rude, I filed it away on my list of things to do over the next few months and carried on toward the ancient facade of Westminster Abbey, dancing along to the tune of our flamboyant guide’s zesty rendition of ‘The Grand Old Duke Of York’.

End of Part 1

Niagara Falls in 100 words or less

We stood drenched as we stared into the sheet of whites and greys as the falls crashed in front of us. We watched the crest as one of the most destructive forces of nature came together and crashed to the lake below. It was unstoppable, insatiable and 15,000 years old. A loud speaker cut through the rising decibels and announced over the thundering of water on rock, “this is Niagara Falls”.

Haunted Prague

“When I seek another word for magic, the one word I can find is Prague,” Maria Rippelino.

His eyes are fixed on the Executioners Tavern across the street, his face is motionless. He is dressed in a top hat and tails and carries a lantern. He is an American living in Prague. He has a penchant for theatrics and a knack for highlighting only the bloodiest parts of history. Meet your ghostly tour guide of the haunted, gothic city of Prague deep behind the iron curtain in the Czech Republic.

We approached through the clinging mist along the street shining with drizzle and with the exchange of a few euros, the tour was on. Our guide swung keenly into character as he lead us from the 15^th century astrological clock, the Orloj, near the Town Square through stony crooked streets, down shadowy alleys, through medieval plague pits and past dark cathedrals all the while noting the gargoyles and chimera hanging from every balcony and clinging to every rooftop. Originally placed there by architects and property owners to guard against evil spirits – because there’s nothing more likely to protect your house than a baby sprouting horns from its temples – these stone sculptures now just offer an uneasy atmosphere to the grey city at dusk as our theatrical guide recounts ghost stories as old as the city itself.

The Orloj is the site of one of the more gruesome tales. Legend has it that in 1490, on completion of the calender dial, the local Government had master clockmaker Hanus’ eyes gouged out so that he could never again design a clock as beautiful as the Orloj in any other competing city. Hanus then had his apprentice take him to the clock where he proceeded to unleash his fury on the clock so seriously that it could not be repaired and those who tried have either died or gone mad in doing so. The clock remains fallible and has only in the last century begun to work in such a way as to be considered accurate.

But it’s not the unreliable mechanics of clocks that gives Prague it’s reputation, it’s the city’s history steeped in black magic and alchemy. So it’s not surprising that when talk turns to supernatural terrors, the city is also high on the agenda. Built on a blueprint of gothic architecture and with a long, bloody and tempestuous history, Prague has become famous as one of the Iron Curtain’s most breathtaking destinations and infamous as one of its most haunted. And it is little wonder why. Even in comparison to Europe’s greatest bloodletters, Prague’s past is a violent one.

Our final stop, illustrates this well. It is close to where we started in the Old Town Square where in 1621, 27 noblemen were executed following the rebellion in the Battle of Bila Hora. Three were hanged and the rest were beheaded and one, Jan Jesenský had his tongue cut out before he met his end. After the executions the heads were taken in an iron basket to the nearby Charles Bridge where they were set on spikes and left to rot to serve as a warning to others. Obviously, our story does not end there.

The spirits of those dead men have not let the city rest in nearly 400 years. They are heard calling to passers-by on the Charles Bridge at night and are often seen in the Town Square where 27 white painted crosses mark the site of the scaffold.

As we watched our guide walk back to the Astrological Clock to begin a new tour for some more lucky foreigners and with twilight dwindling and night setting in, I had a strange desire to walk back through the winding cobblestone streets as the Charles Bridge had once again peeked my interest. But my companions seemed satisfied with an ale at the Executioner’s Tavern. And on second thought – having noticed how dark and dreary it had become – beer seemed like the safer option.

Jack the Ripper and London’s East End

The air bit our faces as we stepped out of the underground station into the early evening frost of December. London’s great Tower was obscured by the light mist hanging in the air while the orange glow of nearby street lamps gave an ominous gleam as they cast grim shadows on leafless trees along the river bank. It was the cold, dark and deserted on the streets of London’s east that we were to explore tonight and what better weather for it. We were about to be taken back to the 1880s where Jack The Ripper was on the loose in Whitechapel tearing his way through the ne’erdowells of Old London Town’s dodgy East End.

London is a city best explored on foot and Ripperologist, Donald Rumbelow knows it. Having studied the mysterious murderer for more than 20 years and conducting these walks for 10, Rumbelow is a walking encyclopaedia on late 19^th Century London. The bespectacled scholar guides us to a nearby underpass close to the old Roman Wall setting the scene with descriptions of the dodgiest streets in 19^th Century London and the prostitutes that would ply their trade outside the nearby Aldgate church.

In those days, Rumbelow tells us, the East End was positively swarming with prostitutes and they were always going cheap. You could buy a loaf of bread for three pennies or you could have it away with a nasty whore down a side street for tuppence.

However, we are informed, the average East End prostitute was often that. Average. Exceedingly so. No Heather Grahams here (see From Hell for example of what a dirty hooker doesn’t look like), just poor, dirty women, stinking of gin who didn’t own more than they carried with them. Their lives were considered cheap so it surprised nobody when one was came a cropper – so to speak – here and there. That is, until one night in September 1888 when a prostitute named Polly Nichols was found with her throat cut to the vertebrae, no witnesses and less than half a pint of blood at the scene. For police of the time, this was a mystery made more sinister when a week later Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride were found dead within hours of one another with similar injury but with far grizzlier, more ‘comprehensive’ mutilations.

“Any questions?” asked Rumbelow after explaining these mutilations in perfect diction as we departed Mitre Square, a site of one of these more elaborate killings. “How could nobody hear the woman scream?” asked a man in the back. Rumbelow fires back, “I wouldn’t imagine she had time to make a sound at all. She would have been dead within a moment of the murderer severed the throat.” Such injuries have in the past given rise to the various notions from Jack The Ripper being a doctor, to a Freemason or just a bored psychopath and nobody is any closer to the facts, even after over a hundred years.

We rounded misty corners, crept through alleys too narrow for umbrellas and wandered down deserted streets following Rumbelow as he traced the Ripper’s footsteps until we found ourselves outside the Ten Bells, the famous Victorian public house noted for its association with Annie Chapman and the Ripper’s final victim, Mary Kelly. From here, it isn’t too far from where Kelly’s horribly mutilated corpse was discovered by her landlord’s assistant marking the end of the Ripper’s spree. This landmark has however been taken care of by London’s modern facade.

It is there that our tour concludes, within site of Liverpool Street Station and a short silent train ride out of the grizzly East and back into the relative sanity of the north west, silently contemplating the unsolvable puzzles detailed on the streets of Whitechapel.

It is perhaps the mystery surrounding these horrendous deeds that fuels the interest in them. The crimes were malicious, arrogant and so very public. Yet the murderer is invisible, still to this day but the interest is still at its peak and is as much a part of London and the infamous East End itself.

Notre Dame de Paris

“All the city was spread out at his feet: with her thousand turrets, her undulating horizon, her river winding under bridges, her streams of people flowing to and fro in the streets; with the cloud of smoke rising from her many chimneys; with her chain of crested roofs pressing in ever tightening coils round about Notre Dame.” - Victor Hugo

We walked up the banks of the River Seine as the huge cathedral came into view. It’s hard to imagine that visitors to the city for the last 800 years would all have been greeted with the same dramatic sight. Notre Dame de Paris, one of Paris’ oldest and most ornate structures. We weren’t within 500 metres of it when we realised how imposing and majestic the building is with it’s two huge turrets, mammoth rose windows and dozens of chimera and gargoyles holding century from on high surrounded by ornate carvings of various saints and biblical scenes.

We approached the church through the throngs of tourists and took in the Gothic veneer from the courtyard before stepping inside where Sunday Mass was coming to a close and Priests and the rest of ‘the procession’ made their way out. As I entered, I muttered what would become a calling card for whenever I walked into any of Europe’s historic churches, a completely unwilling “Holy crap”. This interior is intricately decorated of course with beautiful stained glass, but it was the glorious view of the church from front-on walking down the aisle that literally took my breath away. That said, what can be seen within the church is not the most important thing you will experience… and I will get that later.





After a lengthy stay within the confines of the ancient structure, we decided that a trip to Notre Dame would not be complete without the climb to the top. So, an ice-cream cone, a 45 minute wait and several approaches from Gypsies later, we made our way up the 400 ever-narrowing steps to the causeway high above the courtyard. The view was, of course, exceptional and panoramic and you could really see the detail of the stone gargoyles that adorn every crevice.

We were ushered along by the masses behind us and headed up a wooden staircase to the Belfri to see the famous bell named Emmanuel which was impressive in size and by all accounts, loud. But as we emerged from the final staircase to the tallest viewing platform we stood in awe of the site from the turrets. It’s hard to describe the sights that this kind of position affords but suffice to say you can see the city as you never have before.





You see the ring of high rises encircling the city but never encroaching upon it, you see the Seine winding it’s way north before disappearing to the west of the Opéra National de Paris’ golden dome in the foreground with the Eiffel Tower standing majestically out of the mass of 18^th Century apartments stretching in broken rows all the way to Montemarte where this mass is punctuated by the Comedie Francies and the spires of Paris’ many lesser cathedrals. You can see the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur standing in pure white on the hills of Montemarte looking all the more Holy than it is renowned when set against the greying apartments of a red light district bathed in sunlight.

But most of all you can see that you are at the centre, that you stand at the beating heart that governs Paris and it gives a sense of how significant this cathedral is to the city. Notre Dame holds the reigns of the city, steering its course. Indeed, it marks the city centre and all distances to and from Paris are measured from this very courtyard.

Looking out from here, past the gargoyles at the grandest city in Europe beneath your feet, you get the similar feeling to that which you get when walking through those massive wooden doors to the assembly below. You are immediately struck with the indescribably powerful assertion that you are standing on a sacred patch of Earth. Even if you don’t go in for Christianity, this structure has been preserved for a reason. It harks back to an almost forgotten time in history. From a place of pilgrimage in the Crusades to desecration by Revolutionary forces in the French Revolution to being marked for destruction by Hitler himself in World War II, this site has played a massive part in history and is worth more than the footnotes usually afforded it.