Underground Paris

---

What better way to see a city than to spend your morning underground? In a super-old and creepy graveyard? That's what we thought, so we got up at 7 to go get in line for the catacombs. As I write this now, I'm realizing how crazy we sound.

It was worth it. The Paris Catacombs are massive, first off. 6 million bodies' worth of bones are stacked within in amazing walls to create paths. The entire trip through takes about an hour and a half, because you're walking, at a guess, 2 miles, first through old quarries, and then through the catacombs themselves. It was dark, damp, and filled with death, and one of the coolest things I've seen.



After that, we found a bakery and a grocery store nearby, where we got food for a picnic (and a cake for Samii's birthday!), then walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens to eat. We ended up sitting around there for quite a while before moving on to see Notre Dame, which we obviously had to hit at some point. We spent an hour there walking around, then headed onwards to the Louvre for a quick visit.



You may laugh at that description of our trip to the Louvre. That's fair. The thing is, the Louvre is so big that trying to see it al is legitimately foolish. So we picked our 10ish important things we wanted to see and took our route based on that, then saw whatever we saw on the way.



At this point, we'd been walking all day, so we desperately needed food and rest. We found a restaurant nearby, where I pulled the same trick I've been selling to everyone so far: pick something that has a cool name. That has landed everything from bacon-wrapped sausage to a complete fish on the table before. Tonight it won me a plate with raw hamburger meat. Which was surprisingly not actually bad. We also got the quintessential crêpes for dessert, before heading home, where we played a few games before going back out to celebrate Samii's 21st birthday!



Happy Birthday to both my dad and Samii!

---