out and about: Day 2: Paris

We're still in Paris and will be for another two days doing all the touristy things of course. Today we began at the Catacombs which is basically my dream place (mmm sarcasm..). It's about 21 meters underground, really small and dark, and has only one way out which is at the end of a 2km (1.25 miles) walk through the tunnels of the ossuary. The skeleton part actually didn't bother me. The initial room had posters explaining how millions of years ago the space we were in was covered in water and then became a quarry about 200 years ago. Unfortunately it collapsed once in a while (just what I wanted to know) and was eventually chosen as the site for the new resting place of overcrowded cemeteries. Notre Dame was apparently made of stone from this area of which 1/800th (of the quarry) was now the ossuary. The worst part of these cramped tunnels was the echo of the dripping water. One cool bit about it though was that I could read the majority of the poetic quotes about life and death etched into stones on the walls (putting my AP French Lit. to use hah). The thousands of skeletons neatly stacked with skulls facing you was pretty interesting as well.

We stepped out into broad daylight and clear blue skies (perfect weather today) and moved on to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery where we saw the resting places of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Moliere, Proust, and Chopin (only one of those people is French by the way). I forgot to mention that we rented bikes for the day (only 1.70 euro!) so actually we got to ride through the streets of Paris from spot to spot which was a lot of fun. We rode to the Arc de Triomphe to see the tomb of the unknown soldier and then on to Montmarte for a view of the city. Our last stop was the Eiffel Tower at sunset where we took a million photos and then watched the light show that occurs for five minutes every hour on the hour at night.

Finally we took the metro back to our hotel where I greeted the gentleman at the desk in French and asked for the room key. He said, "ah you speak French perfectly!" When I came back down with my computer to write this post he continued to ask me how I learned french and where I was from, etc. I told him I was the worst student in my french class because I actually study engineering and focused more on math and sciences. He asked me what kind of engineering I studied at which point I was using Google translate for every word such as biomedical, mechanical, devices, prosthetics, etc. He said he was still impressed. Eight years worth of studying french evidently paid off. Boomtown.