What part of "JAY NAY PAH PAH FRANCE-AY?" don't you understand?

The evening of Saturday the 5th I arrived in Paris and met my Cornell friend Emily (last seen on this blog in March) at the station.  We took the Metro to my hostel near the Bastille and got some crepes.  I think my roommate at the hostel (for that night, I had to change rooms every day) was native Chinese, and he didn't speak English very well, so the next morning rather than saying "Have a nice trip" he uttered the far more epic "Good luck on your quest."  Thank you, fellow traveler, and may the wind ride on the heels of your steed.

I met up with Emily we went for a walking tour of the city.  The first thing of interest she showed me was the Pompidou, a hideous building in an otherwise quaint neighborhood whose gimmick is that all of its infrastructure (water, heating, escalators, etc) is visible from the outside.  That sounds cool on paper, but...

Dear Europe: Stop building things.  You lost your touch with the Industrial Revolution and now you look ridiculous.  The same is true for most of your art.

Next we went to the Tuileries (twee-luh-ree, not too-ler-eez), the expansive gardens near the Louvre.  The line for the Louvre was the single longest queue for anything I've ever seen (first Sundays of the month are free admission), so I postponed that for a later date and went to see Monet's water lily paintings at the nearby Orangeries museum.  (Yes, Monet is industrial-era.  I said most art.)

Our next three stops were more or less Paris's greatest hits.  We've got the Arc de Triomphe...

...followed by Notre Dame...

(Tourists are allowed in while Mass is being said.  I found it very awkward.)

...and finally the Eiffel Tower.  It was much, much larger than I imagined and is quite the engineering feat.

We also stopped by a noted English-language bookstore called Shakespeare and Co, which has a very cozy upper floor from which you can't buy the books but are free to browse, write at their typewriter, play their piano, or sleep in their bed.  My grandfather would never leave if he ever visited.

That night we went out for French cuisine.  I ordered the escargot just so I could say I've eaten it.  It was really quite good, and definitely better than Seville's calamares con tinta.

The next day I went to Louvre by myself in the morning.  According to Dan Brown's entirely factually correct guide to Paris, the Holy Grail is buried there so I was really excited.  [SPOILER ALERT.  SORRY.]  The line was much shorter than the day before and I got in for free as a student.  I set out to find the Mona Lisa so I could report that I'd done that.  I wasn't particularly overwhelmed or underwhelmed by it; I was perfectly whelmed at an average level.  It's exactly as you've seen it in photos, and to be honest it's a far more interesting painting of a battlefield that takes up the entire opposite wall.  I remember that one of my SAT reading passages was about a visitor not understanding what's so great about the Mona Lisa, and I see her point.

Art is great and all but I've seen quite a bit of it this semester, so I spent most of my remaining time at the Louvre looking at their ancient collections.  I've seen quite a bit of that too, so I guess I don't get consistency points here.

The Louvre is truly massive, and there's no way you can see the whole thing in one day without losing interest.  I left in a few hours after seeing but a fraction of their collection.  I met Emily back at the Tuileries and we walked to Sacre Coeur, a church on a hill with a fantastic view of the city.

Back down the hill we went to Sante-Chappelle, famous for its stained-glass windows.

That ticket included access to the nearby Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette was kept, but that wasn't particularly impressive.  We capped off the day with baguettes at the geographically-misleading Gardens of Luxembourg.

MISADVENTURE: Upon getting back to the hostel and entering my new room on the fourth floor, I put my towel over the window banister to dry.  A few moments later, it was gone.  It had been blown off by the wind and fallen three stories onto a flagpole.

It was lots of fun trying to explain this to the hostel staff.  I got it back the next day after having had to dry myself with a T-shirt.  Douglas Adams would have been disappointed in the whole ordeal.

I took the regional train to Versailles the next day.  There were two massive lines here, one of which I was able to skip.  I didn't need to buy a ticket, simply flashing my Italian student visa got me in through the gate (once I reached it).  Versailles is everything I was told it was in high school: the most over-the-top luxurious estate imaginable devoted to its resident.  Louis XIV was absolutely nuts.  His luxuries had cushions and there were mirrors to reflect his reflections.

I trained back to Paris and met up with Em again to tackle the city catacombs.  She'd never done this, so she was excited too.  We entered a fairly unremarkable building to the south of the city and went down a long, tight spiral staircase.  We walked along some cold, stone corridors for a while.

That's nice and spooky.  Dark, damp, okay, I've seen it, I'm ready to go.  I'll just turn this corner up here and-

NOT GOOD.  NOT GOOD.

 

THIS IS NOT HOW BONES ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK.  PUT THEM BACK IN A PERSON.

 

 

EMILY, I KNOW THIS WAS MY IDEA, BUT SOMEHOW ALL THIS IS YOUR FAULT.

So in the 1800s there were some "leakage" problems at some of Paris's cemeteries, and by "leakage" I mean "moisture was exposing cadavers and they were spreading disease."  The OBVIOUS solution to this, of course, was to build walls out of their bones in a vast network of tunnels beneath the city.  Clearly, this was the necessary solution.  The transition from stone tunnels to bone labyrinth was truly sudden and unexpected, and the whole experience was really eerie, and it was sort of harrowing to imagine myself tripping, outstretching an arm, and lodging my fingers in someone's eye socket for balance.  We equipped our Lens of Truth (this blog post is a record-setter for geeky references) and pressed onward, and emerged three blocks away from where we started.  The creepiest part?  The office at the end checked Emily's bag before we left, and there were skulls on a nearby table.  Some people actually try to take souvenirs.

That night Em went to go see Les Miserables, but at the hostel I was roomed with two boys about my age from America and Canada who are traveling Europe for the summer.  We went out together to go see the Eiffel Tower at night.  At exactly midnight, the whole thing lights up with a sparkly light program.  Here's my artsy shot of that:

The next day I flew back to Bologna, where I find myself faced with a serious problem: I am leaving for good in two days.