A trip to Notre Dame Cathedral followed by the Catacombs

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There was a food market on our street today so I took a trip out before breakfast and was able to buy the makings of lunch and dinner. I am really going to miss these big markets days that you get in Europe . There is so much selection and it seems like such a more sensible way of doing things than a supermarket.
Benjamin has been interested in a detail from one of his books that mentions Nicholas Flamel - a 17th century alchemist who supposedly discovered the secret to immortality. We went off in search of the house that he lived in and after some wandering around, managed to find it.

After Nicholas Flamel's house, we walked the short distance to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Despite having seen many churches during our travels, the gothic look of Notre Dame Cathedral, the carved details and gargoyles and the shear size of the building makes it a powerful image. We spend some time looking at the details on the outside of the building before going in.

The interior of the Cathedral seems almost designed to impress with the vastness of the space that it contains. The most immediately striking features are the huge circular stain glass windows that grace both sides. Set along the sides of the church are numerous smaller chapels and statues including one dedicated to Joan of Arc.

Outside we had our picnic lunch in front of the Cathedral while I tried to explain the use of the flying buttress support walls to a board looking Benjamin and Joshua. This afternoons tour of the Catacombs full of thousands of bones was more likely going to be their thing.

It was a short walk from the Cathedral to the Catacombs and although there was a line, things were moving fairly fast. At the tickets booth, there was a sign warning of numerous dangers and not recommending the tour for “people of a nervous disposition”. After paying for our tickets (teacher's rates again !) we descended down a stone spiral staircase that seems to go on for ever. At the bottom, we entered a long series of rock tunnels.

We visited some catacombs in Rome and in those the bones had been removed so all you saw was the caves where the bones had been kept. As we walked on and on for what seemed like a very long time, I began to wonder if this was the case here too. Eventually we got to an area where there were a series of photos on the walls showing that bodies had once been stored here. The black and white photos showed shrunken bodies in lining the walls and explained that there bodies had no been moved. I took this to mean that there were no more human remains in the tombs, but when we rounded the next corner we were suddenly facing side chambers stacked high with neat piles of bones and skulls and hundreds of them. With the walls dripping water and the dim light, it was a very creepy sight indeed.

After this we walked for what seemed like miles though the tunnels, full of bones at each turn. Benjamin tried to jump out from the blind corners to scare us, but truthfully nothing could compete with what was right in front of our eyes. Most of the bones are here because they have been removed from various cemeteries including a huge number when they closed the Cemetery of the Innocents in the 17th century.

Both Benjamin and Joshua seemed to truly get into this particular tour and we noted that there was a defribulation machine at the exit when we returned to street level.

Back at our apartment we settled into our usual afternoon routine with the kids doing school work . In the evening we took advantage of our week of internet to continue posting our blog (though it is still weeks behind) while the kids watched episodes of TV shows off YouTube on the iphone.

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