Expediccionado: Old Crumbly Places

Cha and I both had an unexpected break from our first week of class/orientation and decided to put it to good use. We started out the day by heading to a restaurant supply store so that Cha could get the proper shoes for his cooking classes. This didn't take long and when we left the store we realized we were near the historic Les Halles, once the central wholesale marketplace for Paris. It has since been demolished and replaced with an unsightly shopping mall and the market activity relocated to Rungis (a suburb south of Paris). It is now the largest wholesale food market in the world.

We wandered through the mall for a bit and I was excited to discover that it housed the Bibliothèque du Cinéma François Truffaut. Other than that, it looked like any other mall I have been to... except everything was in French. Unimpressed, we headed above ground to check out the former grounds of what was once the biggest outdoor grocery store but only found skeletal remnants of it.

Behind the mall structure we could see a pretty church, so we headed that way to find out more.

As we approached we read on a sign that it was called Église Saint-Eustache.

This place is said to be a masterpiece in gothic architecture.

A modern sculpture sits in front of the church.

This place was huge and dark and gorgeous. I liked it even more than Notre Dame or Sacre Coeur because it actually looked old. It smelled dusty like a used book store. Many of the carvings were faded and worn. It looked exactly like you would expect a building to look if it had been built between 1532 and 1632. It felt delicate and mortal. And despite its state it is still used for masses. There was one happening in a small side chapel while we were there.