Paris part 2

Wednesday, Laura and I again had a rather busy day. In the morning we checked into our new hostel and headed to the Catacombs. The catacombs were pretty cool. For a bit of history, the catacombs were created in the late 1700s when the graveyards of Paris were overflowing and causing rampant disease among the local community. To deal with this problem, three new suburban cemeteries were created, while the rest of the bodies in the graveyards were exhumed and the bones were placed in a decorative fashion in an old limestone and gypsum quarry underneath the city.

To get to the catacombs you descend something like 130 steps into the old quarry. The total distance walked on the self-guided tour is 1.6 km [or about a mile]. For the first portion of the walk it is mostly like being in a cave except for the slightly bizarre feeling of knowing that you are in a quarry beneath an enormous city. The highlight, of course, is the walls of bones, which don’t start immediately, but go on for an impressively long time once they do. The patterns are usually not terribly exciting [stacks of thousands of femurs with rows of skulls around the middle], but the sheer quantity is amazing. It is not hard to see why there were sanitation problems with the graveyard if it was housing this many bodies.

After the catacombs we wandered around the Luxembourg palace area looking for an internet café with wifi and failed as I mentioned before. We did, however, manage to find some very pretty gardens and a fountain in which to dip our feet. Dipping our feet in fountains became sort of a theme of our time in Paris, as it was around 90 degrees the first four days we were there and we were unable to keep cool without these wonderful fountains. Later in that same day, after a bit more wandering and window shopping in Paris, we ended up back at the Louvre, where we again took up seats around the fountain and watched the people around us. We considered the Louvre, but even after 6pm it still costs 6.50, and we found better ways to spend that money. I've no real desire to see the Mona Lisa.

As dusk approached we found a grocery and picked up some supplies. We then headed over to the Eiffel tower and had a picnic with a little bit of dinner and champagne while we waited for it to get dark and the tower to light up.

When it finally got dark enough [around 10 or so], the tower was lit up with blue lights and covered in strobe lights which would light up for 5 or 10 minutes at a time and were very interesting to watch.

We caught the last train home, and that was the end of Wednesday.