Day 53 - Paris

We were originally planning on taking a bike tour around Paris with the same company that we went with in Berlin (Fat Tire Bike Tours), but we decided instead that our time would be better spend going into places rather than biking by them because Paris, arguably of course, has better indoor things to see and less actual ´sights´than Berlin does. Anyways, we didn´t do the bike tour.

Since we were moving hostels we decided to get that out of the way early and walked over to Aloha, then back to the 3 Ducks and met up with the girls from Sherbrooke and headed off for the Paris catacombs. Tooks us about an hour to get there, but the walk was great because Paris is such a pretty city and the weather was so great all day. We walked through an old old cemetary on the way and say the grave of some dead French writer that Andrea really likes adn then found the entrance to the catacombs, which was totally unassuming considering there are the bodies of millions of dead Parisians down in them.

The catacombs in Paris are in an old underground rock quarry that were converted to an underground tomb in the late 1700s because of disease spreading throughout Paris because of the overflowing cemetaries. So basically they exhumed millions of bodies and then under the supervision of priests brought them into these underground tunnels and stacked them all up.

So we paid and then descended th 20m underground and walked through the 1.6 kms of tunnels. It was a bit creepy, dark, and very moist down there, and, oh yeah, there were human skulls and bones stacked everywhere. It was pretty mind blowing to see so many bones everywhere, neatly stacked, in these long underground tunnels. The bones you could see were mostly femurs or large arm bones and skulls and they were stacked 3 to 5 feet high and 5 to 10 feet deep in most places. It was all pretty weird but cool. Must be alot of ghosts down there. It took us about an hour to go through the stretch of tunnels and then came up in a completely different neighborhood seeing as we´d gone a mile underground.

So we got our bearings, then hit a grocery store for a small lunch and found a park to eat in not far from the catacomb entrance. Again, i couldn´t resist and had to feed the pigeons which pissed Andrea off cause she´s terrified of them, and even worse so, so ended up getting shit on because of me....haha.

From there we headed in the direction of the Cathedral to Notre-Dame just after 4 and went into the church in search of Quosi Modo, but to no avail. The church itself was pretty good, maybe a bit of a disappointment as far as the popularity and legend of Notre-Dame, but then again, every church has been a bit of a disappointment after St. Peter´s Basillica, although i hear the one in London is bigger, so i´ll have to check it out.

We left the church and wanted to go up to the top, but they let the last group of the day up 20 seconds before we got there so couldn´t. So form there we walked down the Seine River, watched some trick rollerbladers for awhile, and then stumbled onto the Great Canadian Pub on the bands of the Seine, and were about to sit down and have a pint till we noticed that a pint was going to cost us €6 ($9 Canadian) so we just took a free picture instead then headed back to our hostel.

We cleaned up and relaxed for awhile back at the Aloha and ran into a Canadian guy, Aaron, from London, ON, and he came with us to get some Chineese food from around the corner and then we headed to the 3 Ducks for some beers because our hostel doesn´t have a bar or much of a social scene. We chilled there for a couple hours, then back to the hostel around 1am and went to bed.