Parisian Blog - Day 5 - Solstice
Ah, may favourite pastime: killing time in airports. I’m about 40 minutes away from hopping on the plane back home.
Went for a final stroll along the Seine this morning, took some snaps of Paris’s most decorated bridge and popped in at Notre Dame again before heading off to St Sulpice. My little science experiment there wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped, though.
My wish for better cloud cover finally came true on the one day on my trip that I wanted bright sunlight.
About twenty other people and I spent an hour waiting around for Paris true noon (13h00, thanks to daylight savings). As the bells rang, a feeble patch of light appeared about half a metre away from the marble plaque that the sun is meant to cross on the Summer Solstice (today).
It took about 15 minutes to reach the brass line, and that doesn’t seem to tie up with what I was expecting. I think that the original hole in the stained glass window was covered up, and the patch we saw was just a coincidental piece of missing glass (after all, it was square, not round like it was supposed to be)
[Edit: I should have thought a bit harder at the time: based on Paris’s longitude, true noon should actually have been at 13:51, GMT+2 time (SA and French summer time), so I actually left St Sulpice about thirty minutes before the actual event - merde. Homework for engineers: verify or (preferably) discredit my calculations. Extra credit: explain why the answer has to be adjusted by an additional 90 seconds.]
Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience, but straight after that it was hopping back to the hotel where I’d left my luggage and then more bus, M?tro and train hopping to Charles De Gaull airport, which has taken up place as my least favourite international airport, ahead of Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos airport.
All in all, Paris was a fabulous experience, just a bit hard on the feet.