C'est Ici L'Empire de la Morte!

---

As Americans, we have very little sense of "Ancient history", considering our country is 200 years old, and had only been populated by Westerners for 500 years. France gives "old" a whole new meaning. I took it a little easy today, and spent the morning making train reservations for the rest of my trip. That railpass is really the way to go!! I think I saved hundreds of dollars, and once again, my broken french, with the agent's broken english made for a humorous, yet productive interaction.
Afterwards I tried to go to the observation deck of the Montparnasse building (some call it a tower). I'm not really sure of this building's significance, but I can see it from my street, and it's huge, and is supposed to have a great view from the observation deck at the top. I get there to find out it costs 10 euro just to ride the elevator to the top!! That's only two euro less than the Eiffel Tower! Granted, I would have gotten a youth discount, but still! It's the principal of the matter. I'm pretty sure this is an office building. Do people have to pay to go up the Sears Tower?
So I disdained them all, and went to my next destination, the Catacombs of Paris. In the late 1700's, Paris' cemetaries began to get overcrowded. Before this, churches would have their own cemetaries, but the increasing population of the city led to the "unsanitary" conditions of these burial grounds. I shudder to think what these conditions might have looked like. Probably not as much dancing as Michael Jackson's "Thriller", but maybe the same amount of rotting corpses out in the streets. So they used the old Quarry, which used to be outside the city lines, and transported all the excess dead. The Ossuary went through a couple renovations, and in their current state, the skulls, femurs, and tibias have been "decoratively" arranged into walls lining the underground paths. Some are even in spiral patterns, centered around a skull in the daisy's middle. Morbid, I know.
I hear that older French kings took a grotesque interest in these catacombs, and even had parties down there. The paths were endless, winding, a little bit eerie, might make a great Halloween haunted house. I should propose it to the French entertainment board. They could charge 9 euro, and give that lame Tower a run for their money.
There's also a cool phenomenon called a "bell hole", where tunnels in the Quarry collapsed, and the result on top of the collapse had the curve of an inside of a large bell. Walking through one, the inserted in the middle of the bell-room a pillar with a vase on top. The glow of the orange lights made the walls look ancient, and I worried a stone would come rolling down the tunnel behind me if I touched the vase. Then I heard a man ahead of me hum a little John Williams, and I new I wasn't the only one sensing the Indiana Jones vibe.
It was the magnitude of the bones, and the length of the skull lined tunnels that amazed me. All these people who died around the same time that America was just getting started, and I reached out and touched their leg bones. I wasn't supposed to, but who can resist?

---

Comments

[Dan]

$12.50
That's how much to access the Skydeck at the Sear's Tower. Worth it though. Glad you're still alive. And France too, I guess, after they flipped the switch on that atom smasher near you. No black holes in the area is a good sign. If you see any Manet paintings, think of me, old and serious (though I do giggle when I read French words like Magots and Butte). Stay safe. Go White Sox!!!