Europe Tour: Day 9

Thu. 09-06-07 -- Paris, France
Originally published on: 09-14-07

Today we got up around 9am and got ready nice and slow. I checked my email and discovered that I had received an email from a pension in Barcelona that said they had rooms. I went back to the room to finish getting ready, and then we hit the computer one more time so that I could send them my credit card number. I was pretty paranoid about someone capturing my card number from the computer, so I typed it out of order (to confuse key loggers) and deleted my sent mail in case some one could get into my email.

Then we set out toward the catacombs which is walking distance from our hotel. After maybe 5 or 6 blocks of walking, we stumbled across an ATM, so we decided to withdraw more cash. As I fished for my ATM card, I realized that I never put away my credit card! I turned to Kara and said "What did I do with my credit card?" as I started frantically patting my pockets. "Did I leave it by the computer?!?!" I asked myself out loud. We started walking back to the hotel, but then I handed my day pack to Kara and ran back the rest of the way. When I got back to the computer, my credit card was sitting there on the keyboard! Good thing I was all careful when I typed it in! I walked out and found Kara on the street walking back and gave her the thumbs up.

The upside of this adventure is that we walked back to the ATM from the other side of the street where we saw a farmer's market. We picked a few bananas for breakfast then waited to be served. We waited for some time without being helped before a woman behind the counter told us in pantomime & French that there was a line & we were not in it! We got in line with our bananas and then noticed the people weren't picking their own produce. The customers would say what they wanted and the person behind the counter would get it and bag it. Oops number two! We decided to get an apple and a pear for lunch too, but we waited until we were served and pointed at them instead. The people behind the counter were quite nice with us even though we were doing everything wrong!

We ate our fruit as we walked down the street, and then we hit up the ATM for 290 euros (an amount that gives us a few small bills). Then we walked to the catacombs, paid, and climbed down the seemingly endless spiral staircase. The catacombs were originally a quarry, and we had to walk through some long quarry tunnels before we actually made it to the rooms with bones. The rooms with bones were pretty creepy at first but they went on for so long that I eventually grew numb to the creepiness. The walls were made up with stacks and stacks of human bones. The were actually laid out in patterns with femur ends poking out and occasionally a row of outward facing skulls. I kept daring Kara to touch a bone, but she wouldn't do it (I wouldn't either!) We eventually made our way through and emerged a ways from where we entered. We found a supermarket and bought cheese, some unrefrigerated moldy sausage, and some fruit juices. Then we went to a bakery and bought a nice big baguette. We hopped the metro to the Eiffel Tower, and had our picnic in Champs de Mars with the Tower as our scenery.

After lunch we walked to a bike shop and rented bicycles for the rest of the day! Paris is a pretty bike friendly city (bike lanes, separate bike paths, even special stop lights for bicycles) but it still didn't make riding in downtown a peaceful experience. It was hectic at times, but it was still very enjoyable! We rode from the shop out to Hotel des Invalides which is a cathedral that houses Napoleon's tomb. The whole cathedral has been converted to this purpose, and it was seriously over the top! Napoleon's remains are housed in this HUGE stone coffin thing and all around are statues and these relief carvings that show scenes of Napoleon's great accomplishments. In these scenes, Napoleon is depicted as an ancient Roman on a thrown laying down his law. The whole thing really did feel beyond what would be considered reasonable (at least to me). Whether it was done for French nationalistic propaganda purposes or the true idolization of the man, it seemed so far above and beyond that it bordered on worship.

We left Napoleon's alter ... er tomb (it was interesting to see, I enjoyed my visit, I just sound grumpy about it now) we visited the World Wars I and II museum that was included on the ticket. The exhibits were mostly in French, so we just walked through kind of quickly and looked at the exhibits.

Back to our bikes and we rode to Luxembourg Gardens. I thought this might be a nice park to ride our bikes through, but it wasn't that pretty. It was mostly gravel grounds and we just walked our bikes through a little section then got back on the road. We rode over to Notre Dame to see the memorial to the French people deported by the Nazis in WWII. It was a simple stone area that was very stark and isolating. A quiet place to ponder rather than a place to read and learn.

With that our day's planned events were done so we rode back to the bike shop. We rode all the way back from Notre Dame along the left bank of the Seine. We passed lots of cool buildings and bridges including the Louvre, Musee d'Orsay, and, but of course, the Eiffel Tower. I shouted forward to Kara "look up at the Eiffel Tower as we bike past it, it's a memory that will last!" and we did just that.

We turned our bikes in and rode the metro back to our hotel. We had a dinner of our leftover bread, cheese, and meat along with the pear from this morning's farmer's market. It was so yummy that we took some silly pictures of Kara eating it.

After that it was reading, checking email, and some writing. And now an early night to bed because we have to catch a train at 7:15 tomorrow morning. See you in Basque country!