I See Dead People

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  Paris, France
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Bizarre Travel Experience #2 - Being woken at 4am by a group of French youths having a balcony party directly across the street from our hotel room. We were so tired that the noise didn't keep us awake for long, despite our laughter at the bad "English-is-my-second-language" rendition of Passenger by Powderfinger. Sung with such gusto at 4am despite only knowing one line of the chorus. Bernard Fanning would have been so proud!!
 
Today didn't start out with the intention of being "Dead People Day". It just seemed to become the common theme as the day went on. It guess it makes sense when you think about how many great people have lived in this city over many hundreds of years.
 
We started the day before the sun, thanks partly to our jet lag and partly due to the musical inabilities of our neighbour across the street

Matt looking scared in the Catacombs

. We had been awake on and off since 4am, and at 6am decided to make the most of our early rising and head up to Sacre Coeur to see the sunrise over Paris. It was quite a walk uphill from our hotel in Montmartre and ended with about 150 stairs up to the church. Needless to say we were pretty hot and sweaty when we arrived despite it being quite a crisp morning. Paris is so different to home in that the city wakes so late. At home, the peak hour commute is well underway by 7am, but here the streets are deserted except for garbage men at that hour. We got some great photos of the church and of the Paris skyline as the sun rose. It was also nice to have such a busy tourist attraction practically to ourselves.

We wandered down through the cobbled streets of Montmartre and saw the windmill on the hill. We found our way to a very busy café, where we joined the locals on their way to work and partook in a coffee and croissant. One of my favourite things when in Paris is the breakfasts, and it was nice to enjoy it knowing we had more than earned it already with our pre-breakfast stair climb.
 
After making ourselves look a little more Parisian by changing the polar fleece jumper for a black jacket and funky hat, we headed across town to Musee Rodin. I had always thought this would be a cool place to visit, but in a city like Paris there are so many big ticket places to see, that it has taken until my 4th visit to get there.  I was pleased that we did as the sculpture garden and the manicured gardens around the 19th century mansion were quite spectacular. We found a lovely quiet spot and relaxed for a short while in sun lounges wondering what the poor people were doing. The sculptures themselves were interesting, even though I only knew a few of the more famous ones like "The Thinker" and "The Kiss"

Musee Rodin

. "The Thinker" was definitely the highlight, as were the "Gates of Hell".
 
Our next stop was the gold dome of the Dome Church which houses Napoleon's tomb. We could see it from the garden at Musee Rodin, and was only a few minutes walk. Napoleon's body is entombed in a red marble sarcophagus which actually has 5 successive coffins inside made of tin, mahogany, lead, lead again and ebony. It sits under the dome of the church and is a little underwhelming in comparison to some of the less elaborate, but more spectacular tombs in the wings of the church.
 
We walked around to the back of the Dome Church, into the Soldier's church, which are connected so that the soldiers and the King can hear the same mass simultaneously but not have to be in the same church. It has a series of flags and standards hanging along each side of the roof, which are the actual standards taken by the French army in battles. Some are so old they are almost threadbare, and I had a moment sitting there imagining the actual battles where they were taken when the enemies were captured.
 
Our museum pass started to show it's worth when we used it to get into 2 of the exhibits in the Musee de L'Armee. Matt was very disappointed to find that a large part of the collection is closed for renovation, but we did still get to see the Relief Map Museum, which had a series of tiny models of many of the fortresses and walled cities around France. We also saw the Armoury collection, which has an amazing collection of suits of armour and swords from medieval times.
 
Lunch was a fantastic baguette of ham, tomato, egg and lettuce eaten in the park in front of Hotel Invalides

Scare Coeur at Sunrise

. There is heaps of construction going up there at the moment as we discovered that Pope Benedict is in Paris on the 12th and 13th and will say Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral. Sadly we are leaving Paris that day so won't be here, but from the construction we have seen it will likely bring Paris to a standstill that day.
 
Our next stop was the Catacombs, which are a little way out of town but right at the entrance to Denfert-Rochereau Metro station. They are these incredible tunnels that were built in Roman times and are 20m underground, which is below even the Metro and sewer systems. They wind for 1.7km and for the last km or so are lined with bones of the Paris dead that were removed from cemeteries around Paris in the 1700's due to overflowing cemeteries. It is quite eerie but incredible to see the effort that had gone into arranging the bones to line the passageways. There were stacks of tibia and femurs, intermingled with rows of skulls. It was useful having my background in forensic osteology, as I was able to determine that all of the bones were in fact human, and that there seemed an awfully large number of femurs and tibias and skulls, and very few other bones. I did spot a few ileum, one sacrum and one lone vertebra suggesting that the rest of them must have either decomposed prior to being exhumed or were thrown in together behind the arranged bones as fillers. It was amazing that at no point did I feel at all claustrophobic despite being 20m underground, and that at no point was Matt grossed out by being surrounded by so many dead bodies. We were slightly shocked to have our backpack searched at the exit for any "souvenirs" that we may have taken. I looked so shocked that the guy pointed to a small pile of bones from that day that they had already recovered. We did have a laugh to ourselves about how one would get one though customs though on the way back into Australia

View from our Hotel at 4am

. Maybe claiming it was your spare femur...
 
The afternoon became a race against the weather as we could see black clouds building up on the horizon. By the time we got the Metro to Luxembourg Gardens it was blowing an absolute gale and blowing up all the white dust from the walkways into our eyes. We headed for the Pantheon which is a church that has the additional role of being the burial place of the great men (and one woman!) of France. The church itself was rebuilt in the 1700s and is quite an impressive building. It houses a pendulum which is suspended from the dome ceiling and hangs down to about a metre off the floor. It swings toward a series of numbers which correspond with the hour of the day, and it is quite amazing when you realise it works by the rotation of the earth. Essentially the pendulum is suspended in space and the church rotates around it with the rotation of the earth. Very cool. We then wandered down into the crypt which houses the tombs of the great men of France. Names such as Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Pierre and Marie Curie adorn the tombs. They have interred people as recently as 1946 and there are still many empty places. We did amuse ourselves by trying to guess who France may have currently that may be worthy. Sadly the best we could come up with was Gerard Depardeau.
 
We finished the day exhausted, with extremely sore feet, sitting in an Irish pub next to our hotel drinking Heineken and contemplating what a great day we'd had. We had dinner in a busy local restaurant on our street, where Matt couldn't resist the urge to order snails. At least this time I was able to watch him eat them without dry retching. I even had a brief moment where I asked what they tasted like, but that window was closed by the time Matt removed it from it's shell. Matt thinks it's hilarious that I am able to eat oysters at home, but can't imagine eating snails. I guess it's what you grow up with. I did remind him that I had tried frog's legs on my last visit so I wasn't a complete wuss.

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