Apparently I no longer know the English language.
It's Sunday and kind of sunny in Périgueux. I set my alarm for 9:00 and had plans to get up and do productive things and go for a run, only to wake up and find out of nowhere that I'm on the brink of losing my voice. Luckily I still have some TheraFlu that Mom brought me over Christmas, so I'll just nurse that for awhile, but still, it's annoying. I'll probably spend most of the day lying in bed so hopefully I won't be sick during the week.
Anyway, I spent Thursday evening to Saturday afternoon in Paris with my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins. Jake and Jenna were on spring break, so my aunt and uncle brought them to France for a week to see Normandy and Paris and since my grandmother loves France, she came along, too!
Jake and Jenna at the Louvre.
Thursday, before I got there, it was raining so they had taken the boat tour on the Seine and seen a lot of the big monuments without getting wet. I played the role of tour guide on Friday and we walked around Paris and hit pretty much all of the big sights: Notre Dame, the Louvre, Champs-Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, Montmartre and Sacré Coeur, and then the Aschenbrenners (the cousins + parents for those of you not acquainted with my family; it's my dad's little sister and her family) went to the Eiffel Tower in the evening. Grandma and I had already both done the Eiffel Tower several times in the past, so we went out to a tiny little restaurant she had gone to in the past; it was delicious! We had some great authentic French food and had a stereotypical (or perhaps just typical) French waiter who flirted with us and gave us free after-dinner drinks. The Aschenbrenners also got really lucky at the Eiffel Tower and went up, saw Paris, and went down in about two/two-and-a-half hours. When we were there in December, it took us nearly five!
I didn't take a ton of pictures, but here are some:
The street where we stayed, rue Réamur, which caused more problems with it's pronunciation for the non-French speakers. (There are a whole lot of throaty French R noises in that word! Jeff and Karen had a hard time getting a cab driver to understand where they wanted to go). We stayed in a nice apartment with plenty of space for all of us!
Waiting in line to go into a Notre Dame. Clearly we had cloudy weather, but no rain, so it worked out all right!
Grandma with three of her grandchildren!
The Aschenbrenners + Grandma had been in Normandy and did a good D-Day tour, saw the Bayeux Tapestry, stayed in the mill house of an old château, visited Mont Saint-Michel, and saw some other ares of Normandy. They all seemed really to have liked it, which is great! It was, however, bitterly cold and windy!
Also, shortly after Karen and I recounted stories of getting pooped on by pigeons (Karen) and geese (me), Jenna got pooped on by a pigeon.
My family flew back on Saturday morning (with one of my suitcases in tow!) and I didn't have a train until 1:45, so I went over to the Catacombs of Paris. The Catacombs are part of the old abandoned mines of Paris. There are over 200km of old quarries under Paris; most of them are dangerous and highly illegal to explore. Two kilometers of them, however, are open to the public. They're well-known because in the 1700s, Paris's cemeteries were overflowing and poisoning the city, so millions of Parisians were disinterred, cleaned up, re-blessed, and moved to the Catacombs. There are the bones of six million Parisians now stacked down in the Catacombs in the tunnels of these old mines. As a tourist, you can walk through the tunnels and through the areas with the bones.
So, yes, as you're probably wondering, it's kind of creepy. But I'd always wanted to go, and it seemed like it would be a good time. I lined up at 9:15, a full 45 minutes before it opened - and it's a good thing I got there that early. There were already some people in line and by the time they opened at 10, there were hundreds and hundreds of people in line. So, if you're ever in Paris, get in line nearly an hour ahead of time, otherwise you'll be in line all day (and they only let in 200 people at any given time, so it's not a line that moves fast).
So it wasn't quite as dark as this picture makes it look - but this is the general idea of what the Catacombs are like. Parts are more finished than others; this is clearly one of the parts that is not very built-up.
Some carvings of a port city that a man who worked in the quarries carved from memory. There was also a plaque next to this spot explaining this - and mentioning that the man died when there was a cave-in while he was trying to build an access point to this spot. Slightly freaky to read when you're standing right there.
More carvings by the same man.
It was cool to think that there are more than a hundred miles of tunnels like this under the city. They've been used at a lot of times in history (French Resistance during WWII, during different revolutions in Paris, fictionally in Les Miserables) and were apparently started as mines sometime in the 13th century.
One of the more finished-off parts of the tunnels.
Before you enter the tunnels with all of the bones, there's a doorway with the inscription "Arrète! C'est ici l'empire de la mort" which means "Stop, here lies the Empire of Death." There are also reminders that this is the final resting place of six million people, so please be respectful. Of course there are also reminders that you'll get in big, big trouble if you steal bones. C'mon, people - that is terrible. And really creepy.
I only took one picture of this, but it's tunnels and tunnels of this and plaques saying where the bones came from and also lots of random (and often creepy) quotes about death.
Most of the time there was a British couple walking behind me that I could hear, but at one point I got far enough ahead of them that I couldn't hear them and I couldn't hear the people in front of me anymore and the ceiling was dripping and I was surrounded by bones and tunnels so I sped up to get out of there.
I'm not going to say that it was the most interesting thing I've seen, because it seems a bit voyeuristic to say that, but nonetheless it was an interesting place to see. The history of the mines themselves and then the ossuary of bones (the cemeteries were so full, so dirty that they were literally poisoning the water of Paris) is an interesting one - it just shows how much history there is in Paris.
And the guy at the end of the tunnels (who checked my bag to make sure there were no bones inside - again, yuck) asked me (nicely) if I was québécoise because I spoke French well but with an accent. Despite the Parisians (and most French people) turning their noses up at the Quebecois accent, I considered it a step up. I don't mind being being an American in France speaking French with an American accent - everywhere except Paris. I don't like being an American in Paris because the Americans are just so awful in Paris. The group behind me in line was saying VERY loudly that the French are stupid (they need to be informed that the word in French for "stupid" is "stupide" and that pretty much every single French person knows what the word "French" means) and the group in front had a boy talking about "peeing on the Eiffel Tower." Yes, of course, these people are exceptions to the norm - but, still, jeez. It's those people who give the rest of us bad reputations abroad, which is totally not fair, and, unfortunately, there are a whole lot of them.
That was my morning in Paris. I went to the train station afterward, got delayed slightly because there was a suspicious package that they had to blow up, and then came home to Périgueux! And now only three more weeks of teaching!!
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