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It's the end of my last day. The fact that I'm officially out of important things I wanted to do makes it a little bit better that I have to leave tomorrow. (It's going to be the longest day ever... 12 hours in airports and on planes, then I need to stay up until it's a reasonable time to sleep, Chicago-wise. Now that I'm finally adjusted to time over here. Adjusted enough, in fact, that I had an absolutely epic dream last night about the Doctor going all vengeful Time Lord and interfering with the past, which delighted me until I realized it was the set-up for me and a group of anonymous friends to star in some kind of Seinfeld-type comedy where all of us were vaguely horrible people and those that we'd wronged in the past showed up at random in various different time periods to have their revenge. There was a guy in black leather boots with crosses on the toes that was after me, because I'd done something to his disabled son. He chased me through ancient Rome, and in a stable in medieval England. Tonight, I think I will probably dream of stairs.)
So, today... I got up around 8, had breakfast, and then headed off to the Catacombs. They weren't on my map, which was the first problem. See, the website said it was at 1, avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy. Which of course I didn't remember exactly, but remembered well enough to know that it wasn't Place Denfert-Rochereau. So I walked around in a giant circle. Endlessly. In fact, I was so convinced that it wasn't on Denfert-Rochereau that I passed the entrance at least once. Then, I found a map that said it was on Ave. Rene Coty. It wasn't there. Finally, a found a sign that it was on Denfert-Rochereau, which they're apparently renaming Colonel Henri Roi-Tanguy. After walking around in another circle trying to find the street, I finally found the entrance.
And, of everything I've seen in Paris, the Catacombs are definitely one of the coolest. (I totally didn't take about 70 pictures... in the dark.) Museums are all at least a little bit the same (and at this point, everything painted between about 1500 and 1850 looks pretty much the same to me), but I've never been to a giant underground ossuary before. I can't even being to imagine how many people's bones are down there. Dozens of cemeteries, all exhumed hundreds of years ago. Bones four feet high and at least three feet deep. And I was lucky, very lucky, to be able to make my walk through almost entirely alone. There were a couple of tourist groups I either passed or let pass me, depending on their speeds, and other than a giant, giant group of very noisy Germans on the way out, it was quiet and dark and... actually, I can't say creepy, because when there are that many bones, it's really hard to process the fact that they all used to be people. The ceiling was drippy, some of the skulls were arranged into crosses and other patterns, there were death-appropriate quotes on placards among them... I feel weird assessing a giant grave as cool, but it was cool. I felt bad for some of the skulls that were shiny from being touched, though. And the ones that'd been vandalized. There's something vaguely unsettling about subjecting human remains to tourism. (Kind of like how I felt bad for the mummy at the Louvre. I mean, they're just supposed to be resting eternally, it's not their fault they're really fascinatingly well-preserved. Though I guess I wouldn't really hold it against a future culture... but I'm not a vengeful person. I imagine at least some of those people whose skulls make up the crosses in the Catacombs aren't happy about it, even if the bones look like they were all treated with a serious amount of respect.
After the Catacombs dumped me out onto a random side street I headed off toward the north and what I hoped would be lunch (my stomach seemed to enjoy growling at passers-by in the Catacombs. It was both funny and quite embarrassing). I made it up into Montparnasse before I decided what I wanted for lunch. I ended up at a cafe where the service was so slow even the Parisians would sit down and start looking around for the service staff. The waitress was nice, though, once she showed up, and is the only person in France who has waited on me and not switched to English. And we did just fine. I ordered ma salade, and ma tarte aux noix (so very tasty), I managed to understand that I was to fetch her if I needed anything else. But then the guy next to me decided he was going to start asking me some questions in French, and either his accent was super, super thick, or the questions were so simple and unexpected I couldn't parse them (the first question, after about four tries, turned out to be "Why don't you have any bread?", the correct answer to which is "I didn't know I was supposed to have some" but my answer had to be "je ne sais pas." He then asked me two or three other things I couldn't make out in the slightest, and after apologizing profusely (he wouldn't take "I don't understand" for an answer), I went back to eating in the hope that he'd just stop making me feel like my French was terrible, because the waitress was doing a great job making me think it wasn't as bad as I thought it was.
I wish I knew what he was asking, though. Now I'll never know. It was probably something like "Where are you from" or something equally obvious and simple I really should've understood.
Oh, right, and lunch somehow took two hours. And most of the people at the cafe hadn't moved in that time. Do people in Paris get two hours for lunch? (I actually vaguely remember something like that being true...) Because otherwise, the unemployed seem to have an awful lot of money for loafing around in cafes. Lumch was not exactly cheap. I do appreciate that tax is already included in most of the prices around here, though. It makes things super-simple.
The rest of the day was pretty much spent walking. I made it up to Invalides, which has a freaking grass moat. Not like, a strip of grass around it, but a seven-plus-foot deep reinforced trench with grass growing in the bottom. The sort of thing that, if you fell into it accidentally, you'd just have to hit the reset button for, because there's no way to climb back out of it. (I actually wonder what happens if you fall in...) After I crossed the river, I gave up on walking. I think I'm at the point that I just cannot walk anymore. I'm past my legs hurting (they stopped several days ago), but I think maybe they're going to hate me forever now. Also my feet are begging me for a new pair of shoes, and I think I'm going to have to oblige when I get back, because I seem to have worn through the padding of my only pair of really comfortable shoes (they were already several years old when I brought them here).
Also, this hostel is playing some ridiculous French radio station that seems to play nothing but late-90s pop music. It's... they're playing "Bugaboo" by TLC right now, which is just bizarre because I don't think I've heard it since high school.
Lessons Learned: Cities should not rename streets. Catacombs are cool. I have had enough walking for the next year or so. Or at least the next month. Week... at least a day. Minus the walk to the train station tomorrow. And around the airport. Sigh.
I'll admit, I'm actually, just a little, looking forward to getting home and going grocery shopping tomorrow. I have come across so many open-air markets here and I really want groceries. I'm tired of sandwiches and meals-made-by-other-people. As good as they've been, I keep seeing all these fishmongers and produce sellers and someone offered me a bag of mushrooms tonight that I would've gladly turned into something if I, you know, had a kitchen. I wish I could take one of these markets with me, because I know shopping at home just isn't going to be as exciting at all. But at least it'll be food I know the names of, and that I can turn into whatever I want.
Oh, there are also three more pictures for today. There would be a lot more, but I've hit my monthly limit on Flickr. They could use some polish anyway, though, since they were almost all taken underground.
I also sent out the rest of the postcards today. You can expect them... some time after I get back.
So, today... I got up around 8, had breakfast, and then headed off to the Catacombs. They weren't on my map, which was the first problem. See, the website said it was at 1, avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy. Which of course I didn't remember exactly, but remembered well enough to know that it wasn't Place Denfert-Rochereau. So I walked around in a giant circle. Endlessly. In fact, I was so convinced that it wasn't on Denfert-Rochereau that I passed the entrance at least once. Then, I found a map that said it was on Ave. Rene Coty. It wasn't there. Finally, a found a sign that it was on Denfert-Rochereau, which they're apparently renaming Colonel Henri Roi-Tanguy. After walking around in another circle trying to find the street, I finally found the entrance.
And, of everything I've seen in Paris, the Catacombs are definitely one of the coolest. (I totally didn't take about 70 pictures... in the dark.) Museums are all at least a little bit the same (and at this point, everything painted between about 1500 and 1850 looks pretty much the same to me), but I've never been to a giant underground ossuary before. I can't even being to imagine how many people's bones are down there. Dozens of cemeteries, all exhumed hundreds of years ago. Bones four feet high and at least three feet deep. And I was lucky, very lucky, to be able to make my walk through almost entirely alone. There were a couple of tourist groups I either passed or let pass me, depending on their speeds, and other than a giant, giant group of very noisy Germans on the way out, it was quiet and dark and... actually, I can't say creepy, because when there are that many bones, it's really hard to process the fact that they all used to be people. The ceiling was drippy, some of the skulls were arranged into crosses and other patterns, there were death-appropriate quotes on placards among them... I feel weird assessing a giant grave as cool, but it was cool. I felt bad for some of the skulls that were shiny from being touched, though. And the ones that'd been vandalized. There's something vaguely unsettling about subjecting human remains to tourism. (Kind of like how I felt bad for the mummy at the Louvre. I mean, they're just supposed to be resting eternally, it's not their fault they're really fascinatingly well-preserved. Though I guess I wouldn't really hold it against a future culture... but I'm not a vengeful person. I imagine at least some of those people whose skulls make up the crosses in the Catacombs aren't happy about it, even if the bones look like they were all treated with a serious amount of respect.
After the Catacombs dumped me out onto a random side street I headed off toward the north and what I hoped would be lunch (my stomach seemed to enjoy growling at passers-by in the Catacombs. It was both funny and quite embarrassing). I made it up into Montparnasse before I decided what I wanted for lunch. I ended up at a cafe where the service was so slow even the Parisians would sit down and start looking around for the service staff. The waitress was nice, though, once she showed up, and is the only person in France who has waited on me and not switched to English. And we did just fine. I ordered ma salade, and ma tarte aux noix (so very tasty), I managed to understand that I was to fetch her if I needed anything else. But then the guy next to me decided he was going to start asking me some questions in French, and either his accent was super, super thick, or the questions were so simple and unexpected I couldn't parse them (the first question, after about four tries, turned out to be "Why don't you have any bread?", the correct answer to which is "I didn't know I was supposed to have some" but my answer had to be "je ne sais pas." He then asked me two or three other things I couldn't make out in the slightest, and after apologizing profusely (he wouldn't take "I don't understand" for an answer), I went back to eating in the hope that he'd just stop making me feel like my French was terrible, because the waitress was doing a great job making me think it wasn't as bad as I thought it was.
I wish I knew what he was asking, though. Now I'll never know. It was probably something like "Where are you from" or something equally obvious and simple I really should've understood.
Oh, right, and lunch somehow took two hours. And most of the people at the cafe hadn't moved in that time. Do people in Paris get two hours for lunch? (I actually vaguely remember something like that being true...) Because otherwise, the unemployed seem to have an awful lot of money for loafing around in cafes. Lumch was not exactly cheap. I do appreciate that tax is already included in most of the prices around here, though. It makes things super-simple.
The rest of the day was pretty much spent walking. I made it up to Invalides, which has a freaking grass moat. Not like, a strip of grass around it, but a seven-plus-foot deep reinforced trench with grass growing in the bottom. The sort of thing that, if you fell into it accidentally, you'd just have to hit the reset button for, because there's no way to climb back out of it. (I actually wonder what happens if you fall in...) After I crossed the river, I gave up on walking. I think I'm at the point that I just cannot walk anymore. I'm past my legs hurting (they stopped several days ago), but I think maybe they're going to hate me forever now. Also my feet are begging me for a new pair of shoes, and I think I'm going to have to oblige when I get back, because I seem to have worn through the padding of my only pair of really comfortable shoes (they were already several years old when I brought them here).
Also, this hostel is playing some ridiculous French radio station that seems to play nothing but late-90s pop music. It's... they're playing "Bugaboo" by TLC right now, which is just bizarre because I don't think I've heard it since high school.
Lessons Learned: Cities should not rename streets. Catacombs are cool. I have had enough walking for the next year or so. Or at least the next month. Week... at least a day. Minus the walk to the train station tomorrow. And around the airport. Sigh.
I'll admit, I'm actually, just a little, looking forward to getting home and going grocery shopping tomorrow. I have come across so many open-air markets here and I really want groceries. I'm tired of sandwiches and meals-made-by-other-people. As good as they've been, I keep seeing all these fishmongers and produce sellers and someone offered me a bag of mushrooms tonight that I would've gladly turned into something if I, you know, had a kitchen. I wish I could take one of these markets with me, because I know shopping at home just isn't going to be as exciting at all. But at least it'll be food I know the names of, and that I can turn into whatever I want.
Oh, there are also three more pictures for today. There would be a lot more, but I've hit my monthly limit on Flickr. They could use some polish anyway, though, since they were almost all taken underground.
I also sent out the rest of the postcards today. You can expect them... some time after I get back.
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From:
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From:
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I don't think I would mind tourists seeing my remains. Actually, if I checked in on my body from the afterlife and saw somebody saying, "BONES! COOL!" I would probably be absolutely tickled. Now if they were saying my remains were boring, then I might be offended.
From:
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I wonder, if I wanted to be at peace after I died, if I just had them write "These remains are boring" on my headstone, if people would leave me alone... Or would people be more likely to dig me up and check?
From:
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Of course, there are two problems you could still run into. First, what if someone notices the changing dates? I guarantee that if the headstone is otherwise unobtrusive, nobody will. Second, what if the cemetery eventually fills up and stops getting new graves, and your gravestone is therefore interesting just by virtue of a) being in the old cemetery in the first place; and b) being the only apparently young grave there? This is a bit trickier, but maybe you could have the headstone designed to sink into the ground after 100 years or so and, at that point, resemble a cover plate for a utility line.
Regardless, you'd have to make sure to stick around until dynamic headstones become technologically possible.
Or you could just be cremated.
From:
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Oh! I could build a tiny robot with a laser etcher that could come out of a side door in my headstone and change the engraving every once in a while. And then in the future after the earth is beyond repair it can fall in love with another robot from humanity's future and together they can... um... laser-etch my remains.
Up to this point I was all for cremation, but the options for messing with people in the future are looking better and better.