Jessbut what is that hanging in the middle of it? Looks like something from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
ChrissiSame question Jess had already asked: what on earth is this thing hanging in the middle?
That ladies, is a very large and decorative tarp/tenting. The building is huge and my pic - as usual - doesn't do it justice. Like many places in Paris, you can't really grasp how big these edifices are. That 'tarp' is given structure/strung up/ held down by thick steel cables - you can see them in the big picture and the artsy picture of the window. The cables were threaded through eyebolts sunk in the walls and floor of the palazzo level of the building. The part of the eyebolts visible were as tall as me and were probably larger, continuing under the flooring That's how mind-bogglingly stupendous this structure was. The 'tarp' covers a ticket booth. You can also see that in the big picture. You can buy a ticket there and ride those chute-looking glass elevators (those two parallel lines rising out of the tarp) straight to the top of La Grande Arche for a roof-top viewing of the city. The Arc de Triomphe lies in a straight line in front of it off in the distance - any idea why one is called an 'arche' and the other an 'arc'?
JessI like all your pictures of the cemetary but I think this is my favorites from all of the pics....I want to walk down that path!
So did I, and I did.
It was another one of those iconic shots. I'd seen it before -
deja vu like - in many pics of Paris and here I was!
what is that at the first of your post though? all those bones and skulls? Is that MOLD on those bones? yuk!!
The catacombs of Paris. A sight-seeing destination I didn't tell you guys about. It was only a 5 minute trip by RER train to get there, but due to our getting on the wrong train - twice
- turned into a chilly, rainy 2.5 hour ordeal to the 'hood" of Paris on a train and back - graffiti was
everywhere in Paris, even in places so high and precarious you didn't care about what they said, you wondered more how they got up there with the number of spray paint cans needed to color something. That stuff ain't cheap. Why do they spend their money doing it?. The graffiti was familiar though. Fat artsy letters - do vandals take world-wide graffiti spraying classes or something? The writing looks just like American graffiti and just as illegible.
Anyway, back to the catacombs - this is where the needs of the living overwhelmed the needs of the dead. In the 19th century, Parisiennes needed more space in the city and decided to evict all those who were already decomposing peacefully in their graves. Over a span of years, they dug up several cemeteries - I assume they de-consecrated them, otherwise there would have been riots by the living and the dead, I'm sure - and with a priest leading the wagons, took the bones of 6
million Parisiennes to the catacombs below the city. The catacombs were 600 steps below the street level and as the guide book said, it would help if you had a flashlight and were less than 6'2", the roof was pretty low. I warned my sister that this was no place for claustrophobics and to watch her footing. This was a one shot trip. If she fell down or got injured somehow in the catacombs...there is no emergency exit. You have to return to the entrance or go on to the exit. The catacombs were nearly a mile long, I think. I wasn't going to drag her ass all that way. Frankly I was wondering if - at the end of the tour - she was even going to be able to get back
up to street level. She almost didn't, the staircase was so narrow, and people behind us could not get around her. Embarrassingly, she had to stop and rest every few feet. But luckily it was only 200 feet back up to the street.
Anyway, the bones of the dead are stacked - sometimes very decoratively - along the walls. Yes, that is moss or mold growing. I cheated, our pictures look the same, but the proprietors frowned on visitors using flash photography, so we had to find the strongest limited lighting sources in the catacombs and take what pictures we could. The pics you see of the bones are almost exactly what we took - but someone else used flash and got better shots, so I uploaded those instead.
It was
very dimly lit. And there were signs of quotations all over the place. I'm sure they were clever or inspirational or ironic quotes from French literati about life/death/dying, but 1) we couldn't read them because
they were in the dark and not lit! - what kind of moron puts signs in a catacomb, then doesn't put a light next to them?!?! Are the signs there for the dead to read? Jeez!
and 2) because, maddeningly the signs were all in French. One thing the guide books don't say - the French rarely use mutliple language references. The instructions in a box of medicine and the signs next to statues and paintings in museums are all in French.
Heh, we sat in Metro stations all week, listening to the announcements
"Madame et monsieur, madame et monsieur there is an outbreak of anthrax in the tunnels, thousands are dying, please don't inhale or panic and head for the nearest exit..."
or, they might have been saying that, but since they only spoke in French we had no clue and just continued to sit on our benches waiting for the trains.
The catacombs weren't yucky or scary or smelly - the cemetery had been more eerie. I guess the sheer volume of bones kind of numbed you. Like repeating the same word over and over again until it falls into nonsense. The enormous quantity of bones lost the impact of actually being people. And such famous people were there! But like Mozart in the movie
Amadeus, their remains were lost forever in the anonymous heaps. My sister said she'd only gotten spooked once. She paused to take a picture in one side hall, and the strap of her camera swung back and hit her on her side. She jumped.
KeldaI love how you ou the devil face on your sis!!
Chrissi You little devil, you . Painting your sister like this, tsk, tsk
She had it coming.
Thank you for sharing your trip with us
You're welcome. Thank you all for reading.
