Paris

Recalling my resolution from the day before, I decided to be more systematic about my tourism.  Rather than choosing sights that were close to each other, as sensible people would do, I decided to organize my day thematically.  The theme?  Avoiding ground level as much as possible.

But first, I had to stop at Gare du Nord to make my train reservations for Amsterdam.  For the purposes of this trip, I purchased a Eurail Selectpass (allowing 5 days travel over a 30 day period in any three contiguous countries-I used France, Benelux (for the purposes of the pass, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are one country), and Germany).  Most of the time, you can just get on the train you want to be on without worrying about reservations, but a few, including the train from Paris to Brussels, require them.  The ticket counters at Gare du Nord have signs above various agents indicating what languages they speak, so I got in the English-speaker's line.  Everything went smoothly, until the very end of the transaction said, "Have a nice day."  Considering the degree to which Europeans make fun of this American verbal tic (even the vending machine in my office has an endlessly scrolling message across its LCD screen commanding all in its presence to have a nice day), I hope, for the sake of his self-respect as a Frenchman, that he was inwardly enjoying a sarcasm that his tone of voice did not betray.

Next, it was off to the Eiffel Tower.  I changed trains at the labyrinthine Montparnasse station.  As I approached a crossing of two large hallways, I noticed a guitarist standing in the middle, playing away.  It was Andy.

We shook hands.

"How's it going?" I said.

"Pretty good," he said.  "Just doing a bit of first hand research."

"You're not doing too bad on the profit side, either."  The guitar case was filled with coins.

"Yeah, check it out," he said, pointing, "some girl gave me a 20-franc bill.  I think it's because I lost my pick.  I'm bleeding, so they're giving me extra out of sympathy."

"At least you'll be able to cover your band-aid costs."

We talked for a minute or two longer, I dropped in 5 francs, and headed on to my train.

There's a brief moment, and I wish I could tell you exactly where it was, but it's on the train between Montparnasse and the tower after the train comes above ground, when you see a vision of the Paris of dreams.  I don't know quite how to describe it, because it flickers past in a heartbeat, and it doesn't contain any of the great sights of the city, but it's a hill where old buildings are built on top of old buildings up and up in a way that almost makes it look like the New Jerusalem.

If there's an Eiffel Tower in the New Jerusalem, I doubt it has middle-aged Middle-Eastern men milling around it listlessly, selling books of postcards and Eiffel Tower keychains.  A cool cloudy weekday morning in December meant that the souvenir merchants nearly outnumbered the tourists.  A depressing sight, until you look up.

It's useless to approach the Eiffel Tower objectively.  It's less a structure than an icon, and at over 100 years old, it still looks futuristic, if a little rusty.  It's curvier than you think--voluptuous, really; the tower has doubtless been criticized in countless undergraduate gender studies papers as a phallic symbol, but I, for one, think it's a woman.

Today was as hazy as the day before, so it didn't seem worth it to take the elevator all the way to the top.  I paid 20 francs and took the stairs to the second tier.  It's a long way up.  The stairs circle an elevator track, and periodically one would whiz by.  Arriving at the first tier, I rested for a while, wandering around at looking at plaques with photgraphs celebrating the tower's history.  There's a restaurant here, and a post office where you can get you postcards postmarked as coming from the tower.
 

Elevator door.

I continued climbing.  The Eiffel Tower is really tall--almost 1000 feet--the second tier is only about 1/3 of the way up, but that's still like climbing a 30-story building.  It takes a while.  It was an impressive view: across the Seine were the Trocadero and the Arc de Triomphe; the skyscrapers of La Defense shimmered in the distance like a mirage, barely managing to distinguish itself from the grey winter haze.  From three sides of the tower there's nothing to see but beautiful, romantic Paris.  And then there's the south view.  Dominated by smokestacks and postwar apartment blocks, this is the Paris that doesn't make it on postcards.  Above me, the rest of the tower sped toward the sky on an almost imperceptible arc, the deck at the top so far away it was almost invisible.

There was a souvenir stand here selling cheap ceramic sculptures of the tower at prices more appropriate for a Ming vase.  Better to patronize the merchants on the ground if you're into that sort of thing.  Postcard prices are ludicrous as well.  Again, buy those at the bottom, or, even better, at the Arc de Triomphe.

After descending the tower, it was a short walk to my next destination--the Paris sewer museum.  The entrance to the museum is a little blue kiosk next to a staircase going down.  The admission price gets you a self-guided tour
brochure in the language of your choice.

During my sophomore year in high school when we were studying Romanticism, I read Les Miserables for a class.  We were permitted to read the 300-page abridged version, but, as a purist from a very tender age, I opted to read the 1600-page unabridged version (there's a reason I didn't have many friends when I was 15).  One of the reasons Les Miserables is so easy to abridge is that Victor Hugo has a habit of launching into 50-page long digressions on the Battle of Waterloo that are completely irrelevant to the story and can thus be excised easily.  The Waterloo digression was painfully boring, but Hugo's chapter on the Parisian sewer system was insane: Hugo thought that the waste of Paris was being, well, wasted.  It was completely misguided for the destination for all this good, rich Parisian excrement to be siphoned out of the city in sewer pipes and tunnels and into the Seine, and ultimately out to the ocean.  Hugo proposed instead that an elaborate irrigation system be developed by which Parisian sewage would be used to water the fields of France, because what better fertilizer could there be? Leave it to Victor Hugo to wax romantic about shit.

Despite the bizarre tangent, the subsequent chapter detailing Jean Valjean's adventures in the sewers was really cool, so now that I was in Paris, I wanted to see them.

You already know if you're the type of person who likes to wander through sewers.  If you are the type of person who likes to wander through sewers, my comment that the sewer museum smells like a sewer will not deter you.  It smells like a sewer.  Because it is a sewer.  When I first entered, I was in a long tunnel with panels on the wall giving a brief outline of some of the equipment used.  The smell was faint, like I was just downwind of the port-a-johns at the Chicago Blues Festival.  It got stronger as I went on through, reaching its peak at the end of a long gallery with a detailed history of the sewers and the Parisian water supply, where the stench was so sulfuric and rotten it made my eyes water.  Other than that it was pretty tolerable.
 
 

Sewer cleaning ball.

Aside from wandering through the tunnels, there were two extra-cool things about this museum: the first is that there are boats--boats!--that are used to navigate through the larger sewer tunnels to perform cleaning and maintenance work.  One was docked at one of the tunnels, floating serenely in the black water.  In fact, when the sewers were first opened up for tourists in the late 19th or early 20th century (I can't remember which), you could take boat tours...those were the days.  The second is that to clean pipes and tunnels not easily accessible by boats or people, they have these giant balls--and I do mean giant--one on display was easily had a 10 foot diameter.  They're hollow, and just slightly smaller than the tunnels they're meant to clean.  You put one at the mouth of the tunnel, flush the tunnel with water, and the ball floats along, scraping the sides of the tunnel as it goes.  Now that's amazing.

I emerged blinking from the sewers, slightly disoriented, and pretty hungry. I headed for the Arc de Triomphe, planning to find lunch somewhere along the Champs-Elysees.

It's not a particularly long walk from the Sewer Museum to the Champs-Elysees.  I crossed the Seine on a bridge that I'm sure is famous if for no other reason than its monumental gold statuary.  I think I saw Woodrow Wilson cross this bridge on a PBS documenatary once.  On the other side of the bridge giant fabric banners advertising Chanel #5 hung from scaffolding.

The Champs-Elysees is kind of funny.  On a day like this, a few days before Christmas, overcast and cool but not cold, people were out in force--some Christmas shopping, some wandering around looking for lunch, a whole hell of a lot standing in line at the Hard Rock Cafe.  (Let me take a moment to meditate very briefly on the Hard Rock Cafe: for about three years now, there has been a Hard Rock Cafe in Indianapolis, ergo, the Hard Rock Cafe is no longer cool.  Get out of line and stop blocking the Parisian sidewalks, folks.)  Between venerable institutions like the Guerlain store and the Association Nationale du Vins de Pays d'Oc, there's the Gap.

And then, up ahead, just to the right of the Arc de Triomphe in my field of vision, was a giant Frodo Baggins above a cinema marquee.  "A giant Frodo Baggins!  The Lord of the Rings comes out today!" I thought to myself, just before thinking to myself, "Brendan, you're a really major loser if you go all the way to Paris just to see the Lord of the Rings on opening day."  And while it's true that I'm perfectly willing to be a total loser on occasion, a guy's got to have limits.  I kept on going, eventually finding a sandwich shop where I got a baguette with lettuce, tomatoes, feta cheese, and olives from a lovely young woman who took pity on my miserable French and spoke to
me in flawless English.
 

View from the Arc de Triomphe.  In the distance, you can just make out La Defense.

I took my lunch, walked the remaining few blocks to the Arc de Triomphe, sat directly under it, and ate.  The sun even came out for a bit to make everything perfect.  One thing I never knew about the Arc but you get to see while you're under it is that it is ornately carved.  The entire ceiling of the structure is patterned with geometric shapes that cling to the curves of the vaults.

Eating lunch at the Arc is sort of a strange kind of serenity, however.  It is surrounded by a wide traffic circle, and it's so busy that it's useless (and probably illegal) to attempt to cross on foot.  There is, however, a pedestrian tunnel, and when you emerge, there you are, underneath one of the most famous monuments in the world encircled by traffic like sharks on speed.

I paid for my ticket to climb the stairs to the top.  It's a narrow spiral staircase that leads to a large gallery with exhibits on the history of the building.  It's another short climb to the roof, where, to be completely honest, the most spectacular sight is not Paris, but the action in the traffic circle below.  The traffic is so thick it takes a while to notice that the surface of the circle is formed with multi-toned bricks in a star pattern.  The cars and trucks roar around the circle, eventually coming to their turn and pulling off, but there were something like four lanes of traffic trying to turn onto the Champs Elysees--long backed up lines following the signals of traffic cops whose job was to stand in the middle of this seething sea of metal.  At first I thought the job must be terrifying--and I'll bet it is the first couple days--but after watching the traffic for a while, it got kind of hypnotic.  There's a pattern to it--a wildly pulsing and jumbling pattern--but a pattern nonetheless.  And if you're a person whose job is to stand in the middle of all that, a similar calm must set in; after all, most people aren't homicidal, so you wouldn't have to be in constant fear for your life, and there is that pattern.  I'll bet it's boring.

I picked up a few postcards in the gift shop at the top, descended the staircase, and headed on to the Catacombs, my next stop.  Like the sewers, you already know if you're the type of person who would be interested in visiting a mass grave filled with the bones of six million people.  If you were the girl in my biology class who refused to touch the human skull when the teacher passed it around, you have no business coming to this tourist attraction.

The entrance to the Catacombs is so unassuming that it's easily missed--just a door, really.  The Catacombs were created during the late eighteenth century when the graveyards of Paris were overflowing, and room needed to be made for the expanding city.  I went in, paid my ticket, and walked down, and down, and down--the Catacombs lie about 80 feet under street level.  The stairs eventually deposited me in a small, brightly lit gallery with photos on the wall, all captioned in French.  From here I walked into a long dark tunnel.

After walking for a while, I began to worry that this was a total ripoff.  I had come to see bones, but thus far it was just a narrow rock-walled passage with the occasional turn, with blocked-off, completely unlit passages off to the sides.  After some time, though, I eventually got to a sign welcoming visitors to the Kingdom of the Dead.  The passages widened, and on all sides, where the rock had been cut out, the walls were piled about five feet high with bones.  The stacks were orderly, like an obsessively neat person's woodpile.  No effort was made to keep all of a single person's remains together; instead, femurs were stacked with femurs, humeri with humeri. Breaking the osseous monotony of the leg and arm bones were the skulls,
arranged sometimes in geometric patterns, sometimes in crosses, sometimes in the classic skull and crossbones arrangement.  It looked like the piles went back some six or eight feet.  Ribs, fingers, and vertabrae were visible nowhere.

Each section of the catacombs had a marker indicating which cemetery the bones came from.  Many were from convents.  It seemed to me impossible that nowhere in here were the bones of the virtuous mingled with the bones of prostitutes and thieves, or masters with their servants.  In at least two places there are chapels walled with bones: simple rooms with a bare stone altar inscribed in Latin.  I found a stone bench at one point, and seeing no other tourists around me, I decided to sit down and take a moment just to be with the dead.  The dead are quiet.  After sitting in still silence for a moment, the renewed crunch of my boots against the gravel floor seemed jarring, loud, and temporary.  Signs carved in stone in Latin and French everywhere reminded me, as well as I could understand them, that nothing will prevent me from ending up in a similar pile, whether it's an urn stuffed in the back of someone's closet or the woods outside small-town Georgia.  The catacombs are an elaborate and extended version of the refrain of Ash Wednesday: remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It really doesn't take that long for the bones to become mundane.  Bones in massive quantities just aren't that interesting.  I kept walking, and at every turn, there were more bones, and more bones, and more bones, on and on and on.  At some point it occured to me that this wasn't the first time I'd heard the number six million in relation to dead people.  Six million were murdered in the Holocaust, and while of course I've always known that that's a large number, it's a number too large for the mind to grasp in any meaningful way.  Now here I was, staring at the bones of six million corpses, their grinning skulls staring back.  That's a lot of people.

Eventually I reached a staircase and started climbing.  The walls were stone again and I left the bones behind.  The exit door deposited me on a street somewhere.  It is worth mentioning that the exit to the catacombs is not particularly close to the entrance.  I was disoriented but unconcerned.  I picked a direction at random and walked.  I passed through a shopping area, pausing to look at the merchandise available at a fish market.  After a while I turned left.  I was in a quiet residential area, the odd restaurant here and there, university buildings across the street.  I took a detour through a park where elderly couples were walking their dogs.

It was getting pretty late in the afternoon, and I knew the sun would be setting soon.  I decided to head back to the hostel.  The trouble was that I didn't really have any idea where I was, since having completed my agenda for the day, I had just decided to wander.  I took another left.  The road I was on led me to a circle surrounded by apartments, a small park in the
center.  Continuing up a hill on the other side of the circle, I came to a vegetable stand, where I picked up some tomatoes and an onion for dinner.  I kept up the hill, passing a woman walking her child in a stroller and a long line of unkempt men waiting outside an unemployment office.  I hit a commercial street and figured it was a pretty good bet for reaching a Metro
station.

As I passed in front of a cheese shop, a man called out of a car: "Scusi! Parli italiano?"

"Si, un po'," I said.  I minored in Italian in college.  I went over to the car.  There were two young men in it.

"Di dove sei?" one of them asked.

"Sono americano," I said.

"Ok," the driver said, switching to English.  And then, "We have a little problem."  The gist of it was that they were in Paris for some kind of fashion show and didn't have money for gas to get them back to Italy, but they'd be willing to sell me some Versace at a cut rate because they needed the money.  Even if this didn't reek of a scam, I don't like Versace.  I lied and said I didn't have any cash, wished them luck, and continued down the street.

It was dusk before I finally spotted a Metro station.  A later study of a map revealed that I'd been wandering through an area thinly served by the Metro, hence my difficulty.  Across the street from the station was a small supermarket, so I stopped in to get some food to take back to the hostel and make dinner.  A liter of olive oil, a block of feta, a half-kilo of pasta, herbs de provence, and two suspiciously cheap bottles of red wine later, I made my way to the checkout line and then over to the station.

Back at the hostel, I discovered that the kitchen had no kitchen knives, only table knives, so chopping the onions and tomatoes was a little clumsy.  This inconvenience was minor, especially when compared to the fact that I quickly discovered that actually cooking in a hostel (as opposed to making spaghetti or various boil-in-a-bag conconctions) gives you a sort of instant celebrity status.  Everyone wanted to know what I was making.  It was what is known in my family as dinner by default, a very easy and infinitely malleable dish that involves pasta, feta cheese, and tomatoes (plus artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar, and rosemary, in my embellished version at home).

It was glass of (surprisingly good) red wine in one hand, cooking spoon in the other, that I met Dan and Gerry.  Dan, 19, an aimless Texan (by his own admission), was nearing the end of a months long trip through Europe.  Gerry was an Irishman in his mid-40s who looked like he was in his mid-60s, a condition due in no small part, I would guess, to years of drinking and
smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.  A sad case, it would seem, but maybe not an entirely fair assessment: he said that things had been far worse for him than they were now; he could now hold down a job, hence his ability to be in Paris, so life was good.

I joined the two of them at a table when I'd finished cooking.  I was starving, so I ate nearly half the pasta myself, sharing the rest with various interested parties.  Dan and I played a few rounds of pool, and I talked for a while to Mike, a Bostonian headed back to the States the next day.  It was a good night, one that didn't end for me till three in the morning, when exhausted I finally made my way to bed.
 

Next - Naked
 

Copyright 2002 Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale