Stephanie in the City of Lights: Chartres!

Bonjour!
Mercredi après-midi (Wednesday afternoon), I ventured (with AYA) to Chartres, a small town about an hour (by train) outside of Paris, famous for its cathedral with beautiful stained-glass windows. Perhaps you've heard of Chartres blue? It's a very unique shade (apparently the secret to concocting it has been lost in the (golden?) sands of time), and it's quite beautiful. (Wikipedia can give a more comprehensive overview of the building, whose full name is Cathedrale de Notre Dame de Chartres.) We took the SNCF (French railway association) from the Gare de Montparnasse, in Paris, to the town of Chartres. There wasn't much to see along the ride (mostly trees, no fall foliage), but it was a nice trip all the same. The town itself is very cute! Lots of historic buildings, pricey stores, and cobbled streets.... We wandered around the town after we visited and admired the cathedral. We had the good luck to go on a very sunny day, so the stained glass windows were beautifully illuminated! And the architecture of the building itself is quite beautiful as well: very intricate, lots of bas-relief and flying buttresses and other assorted ornamentation. It's amazing to think this was all created without any sort of modern technology. (Nor even with much medieval technology--it was mostly constructed in the 1100s and 1200s, with some additions up through the 1500s.) We really don't have anything like this in America!