Paris

The train to Paris is the Thalys high-speed train. It was a pretty sweet train that went over 150 mph. And I was happy to find that it was sunny and kind of warm in Paris. I had hardly seen the sun during the first couple weeks of the trip. I walked to the Seine River where a lot of people where selling used books. I saw Notre Dame from a far, and then walked to the Lourve. I got there at 3 pm, it closes at 6 on Sundays, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time, but I got to see everything that I wanted to see - Michelangelo’s Slave, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Royal Crown jewels. I walked through the sections on Greek and Roman statues, Italian paintings, Egyptian art and Babylonian art.

The next day I tried to see as much of Paris as possible. I walked to the Pompidou Centre – a strange looking new building that houses a modern art museum among other things. Walked through an underground shopping mall and then went to the Notre Dame cathedral. I climbed the tower to see the view of Paris and got up close to the enormous bell. Then I walked the Champs-Elysées up to the Arc de Triumphe, and then walked to the Eiffel Tower and climbed that. There was an ice rink and restaurant at the first observation deck and you can climb up almost 700 steps to get to the second observation deck. It’s really high up and takes a while to get up there. There are no stairs to the very top, only an elevator. It seemed like climbing up took 30 minutes and going down the stairs only 5 minutes.

I gave in and took the metro to the Montmartre neighborhood (otherwise it was an hour long walk) and climbed the hill to the Sacre Ceur church, the art square, Place du Tertre, ate a giant crepe with sugar that was really good, walked to Place de la Republique, picked up some food, ate in the room, went online, and went to bed around 9:30, dead tired and with some blisters and calluses on my feet. It was a lot of fast walking and stair climbing that day, but I saw most of Paris on foot.

It rained all night long and it was still raining the next day. I walked to the Pompidou Centre to go in the modern art museum, but its closed on Tuesdays so I skipped that and instead walked over the bridge, across the Ile de la Cité and found the catacombs. It was kind of hard to find, but worth it because it was scarier than any haunted house I’ve ever been in. You descend a long spiral staircase, and then go through some tunnels with a very low ceiling. There’s boring information on the history of the quarries there. A lot of suspense builds up before you finally see the bones. All the bones are neatly stacked to make walls on both sides of the tunnel and the skulls are placed in the walls of bones in straight lines or in patterns to make arcs and crosses. Most of the tunnels are closed off so that there’s only one path to take and you can’t get lost. But I was a little worried about the lights going out, or getting lost, getting stuck down there would be scary. There were a few other tourists down there. I’ve never seen so many bones, and they are all from humans. It’s creepy. The exit is many blocks away from the entrance, so when I stepped out I was glad to be in above ground and in daylight but I was immediately lost again.