Paris, France – 05/11 – 05/12

(Michelle) We got to Paris after an 8 hour bus/ferry ride. We checked into our hotel and then went to look for food. According to the LP guide, like any other big city, cheap good eats are often foreign foods. We went hunting for a Japanese restaurant in the guide. We ended up on a street filled with Japanese restaurants, all very authentic looking. We are not talking sushi here, other more traditional daily Japanese meals. For the first time since visiting Sachi in Vancouver (Dec 98) I was treated to OKONOMIYAKI!!! Very exciting for me (I have searched for this all over the states with NO luck). Since I speak more Japanese than French, it was easier for me to order as well. On Saturday, we had a full day of Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Catacombs and the Eiffel Tower. Jean, I think we once discussed what happens when a cemetery is so old that nobody knows anybody buried there anymore… apparently when that happened in Paris, they dug up all the bodies and stacked their bones up in an old query. They made little designs out of skulls and everything. I touched some bones, but TJ wasn’t prepared to do that. I am not usually afraid of heights, but going up the elevator at Eiffel Tower did make me a little uneasy. We hung up there for a while to try to get a sunset shot, but to no avail. Unfortunately, it was so late that we couldn’t easily get a meal anymore. We got a little pizza place to let us get in a take away order. Unfortunately, with the language barrier, we received pepperoni pizzas with egg on top. Gross. This is followed by a small flub up on the Mc D’s order earlier where instead of getting no Mayo, TJ got double mayo on his chicken sandwich.
Pretty much every train we ended up on had some sort of “live music” act for spare change. My favorite one so far is the guy with guitar that he didn’t play (he had basically a karaoke machine) and all he sang were Dire Straits songs. There is nothing wrong with hearing a little Walk of Life / Sultans of Swing first thing in the morning on the train.

(TJ) Notre Dame is impressive of course and you can imagine how it dominated the Paris skyline for centuries. While wondering around the cathedral we found that one of the chapels in between some flying buttress’s (support walls for the cathedral) was a chapel dedicated to St. Denis and that its financial backer was an Aubin from the 1600’s. All sins absolved for him I guess, he must have felt really guilty about something. The stained glass and stone carvings in every corner are really impressive. The Eiffel tower is also very impressive. I would think twice if you are afraid of heights and are claustrophobic however. The views are great but the wait to get up is a killer, I think that we waited around an hour to get up. The catacombs that we saw were unreal apparently there are millions of remains in it, including many leading figures that were beheaded during the revolution. Apparently they converted these old stone quarries that had been used since roman times bone yard about 300 ft below the surface. This all happened in the late 1700’s. Basically you walk around these tunnels and you have retaining walls that are made of femur bones and other long bones stacked like Lincoln logs that then have a course of skulls staring out at you every 2-3 ft. These retaining walls are 6-8 ft high, behind them are just piled clavicles, pelvises, ribs, vertebra, etc. Let’s just say that it is a little surreal. I felt like I was in the Goonies and that Michelle was going to have to play us out of the place on a organ made of finger bones before the Frattelli’s got us.