Paris, France
Posted on 11/13/03
Ah! Gay Paris! Dude, this is the gayest city I have ever seen.
How gay is it? Paris is so gay that it has gone a full circle and become straight
again. So…
Ah! Straight Paris!
The train into Straight Paris was hugely fast. It was going
well over 100 MPH. The close range scenery was jetting by so fast that it
was impossible to focus on anything before it zipped out of sight. The worst
part was when we passed equally fast trains going the opposite direction.
The air vortex created by two things passing each other so fast, inches away
from each other, made it feel like my eyeballs were going to pop right out
of my skull. That sensation and the deafening “whoomp!” sound
that accompanied the moment with no warning scared the living ca-ca out of
me every single time.
At that speed and with only four stops, we traversed the sizable
distance between Bordeaux and Paris in less than three hours.
Paris was just as huge and daunting as I remembered it. Their
metro system is admirably robust and comprehensive. There are over 300 stations
and the layout is designed so that no spot anywhere in Paris is more than
500 meters (about 550 yards) from a metro station, which is fabulous for us
tourists except that it translates into a metro map that is so complex and
huge that you need advanced degrees in navigation and cryptology just to read
it. After staring at the thing for 15 minutes, I found the metro stop I needed
and after another 15 minutes of carefully plotting my course so I would only
have to make one metro change during my voyage, I was under way. Three seconds
later I was being physically held hostage by the automated metro entry gate.
Paris has several different varieties of metro gates. The kind that was mugging
me had these thick, two part, Plexiglas windows that opened away from each
other, like the doors on the Starship Enterprise, after you feed your magnetic
stripped ticket through the reader. I was, of course, attempting to get through
with the Office on my back and pushing the Barge in front of me. I should
have sensed that something was malfunctioning when I approached the gate and
the two panels of glass were already open, but I was just trying to get into
the metro system along with the 74,948 other people who were trying to leave
the train station at that moment and I didn’t want to dawdle and have
an instantaneous mob of impatient Parisians bunching up behind me, so I fed
my ticket through the reader, plucked it out the other end, shoved the Barge
through and started to step through when the panels suddenly clamped shut
during the split-second that my body was through the gate, but the Office
wasn’t. I was hopelessly stuck. The panels seemed to be pressing together
with enough torque to crush a human skull and my mind filled with visions
of the plastic casing of my laptop crunching like a cracker inside the Office.
The person behind me tried to free me by feeding their ticket through the
machine, but the gate did not open. Then a woman tried to physically force
the panels open, while I attempted to help by sticking my feet in the opening
and bracing them out, but we could not get the thing to budge. Finally, with
my feet still propping the panels open so they wouldn’t slam shut on
my hands, I carefully took off the Office and lifted it up over the top of
the gate and back down on my side before I pulled my feet out and let the
gate thump shut. At least two minutes had passed while I was trapped and after
all of the commotion not a single metro person had noticed the predicament
and come to my rescue. In fact, there didn’t appear to be any metro
staff people anywhere in the station. I pulled my laptop out of the Office
and after checking it thoroughly for damage, I packed everything back up and
started the journey to my hotel.
I was turned-on to the Andre Gill Hotel by Debra in San Sebastian.
After checking them out on the web, it didn’t look too bad. Twenty Euros
a night, with sheets, towel and breakfast included. I didn’t learn until
I got there that this deal only applied to members of a certain hostelling
and travel group. Non-members had to pay 85 Euros a night for a single
room with a sink. There were cheaper rooms that you could share with three
other people, without breakfast and without showering facilities, but those
beds were all full. (You had to pay an extra four Euros if you wanted
to shower in this arrangement. No wonder the French are so well known for
shirking regular showers. They’re expensive!)
The hotel owner’s daughter was the only one on sight at
the time and she took pity on my dejected state as I tried to steel myself
for another metro journey to seek out my second accommodations option. She
cut me a deal that kept me in the hotel for the night. It was still more than
I could afford long term, but it was acceptable for one, maybe two nights.
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I had been on an uncomfortable run of being surrounded by sick
people since Barcelona. The trains, the hostels, the bus on the wine tour…
Everywhere I went people were coughing all over me. This tripped off what
I suspect was a hypochondriac reaction soon after my arrival in Paris. I was
definitely feeling funny, so I ate about five zinc lozenges and headed out
to the Sacre Coeur, which was about six blocks straight up hill from the hotel.
The more I climbed, the worse I felt until I got that sensation you get when
you’re really sick, where it feels like you are swimming through a cloud
of cold/flu germs that are oozing from your own body. I cut things short at
the Sacre Coeur and staggered back to the hotel. I sucked down four more zinc
lozenges and took a nap. By the evening I was on the upswing. Perhaps I killed
the cold with the zinc or it could have all been a figment of my imagination.
Either way it was definitely cold and flu season and being sick in a hostel
sucks the big one, so I wasn’t taking any chances.
Paris was freezing. I could see my breath all day long. There
was no afternoon Mediterranean warm up lurking in the background like locales
further south, it just stayed Winnipeg-cold all day. I did my best to look
favorably on this weather and counted my blessings that I was not witness
to the devastating heat wave from the summer, where over 15,000 Parisians
died of heat stroke (mostly the elderly), requiring half-assed, temporary
morgues to be hastily assemble across the city. I mentally prepared myself
for more of the same nipple perking weather, if not worse, in the mountains
of Switzerland. This didn’t bother me, because I knew that more temperate
weather was waiting for me in Italy and Greece. I just had to keep Mr. Happy
and his Posse warm for couple more weeks.
Paris is not a clean city. The streets are peppered with various
forms of animal shit (mostly dogs and pigeons [I hope]), cigarette butts and
mud, though for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where all the mud
was coming from with the entire city being paved over. I suppose any city
with 10.6 million inhabitants is going to get a little messy. The crush of
people, even during off-season, is similar to New York or London. The metros
are jammed, the streets are busy and one out of every three people owns a
dog that is ferried with them wherever they go. If you can keep you crowd
anxiety under control, all this pedestrian traffic translates into a fairly
safe environment. With space being at such a premium in Paris there are few
if any dark, deserted alleys, because as soon as one is located, someone opens
a high priced bistro at the end of it.
People are beautiful in Paris. A small percentage are flirting
with the line that crosses into Euro-Trash, but for the most part the beauty
is natural. Being surrounded by so many attractive people can be very soothing
until you catch you own reflection in the window of a metro and it occurs
to you that you are probably the ugliest person on the entire train.
If the anti-smoking campaign succeeds in vanquishing every single
smoker in the United States, the tobacco companies have nothing to worry about
as long as France holds it course. The only French people over the age of
nine who do not smoke are dead. And although you can find the rare no-smoking
signs on the occasional train or operating room, these are more suggestions
than strict policies. It’s a nationwide free-for all. Smoking etiquette
is nonexistent. No one asks if they can light up. No one bothers to blow the
smoke away from the people in their immediate vicinity and the country is
literally one big ashtray. This is a problem to a certain degree all over
Europe, but France is the undisputed champion. I didn’t take the time
to look into it, but I imagined that the French anti-smoking campaign consisted
of one very defeated looking person, possibly an American ex-patriot, in an
office that is so devoid of action that they don’t even need a phone
or a filing cabinet. The French can’t claim ignorance about the negative
effects of smoking. This past summer all European cigarette companies were
required to enlarge the warning labels on packs of cigarettes to cover over
half the outer packaging surface with no-nonsense phrases like “Smoking
kills!” in 50 point font. Purportedly, the next step will be printing
color pictures of blackened lungs and cancer patients on cigarette packs.
That’ll make pulling out that after-dinner cigarette nice and soothing.
Mmm! That’s satisfaction! Hrrruuuuck!
It rained like hell on my first full day in Paris. I decided
to keep warm and dry by spending the day in the Louvre. I knew from prior
experience that tackling the Louvre was going to require a big time commitment
and big energy exertion. The Louvre is overwhelmingly huge. The crowds, even
in October, are fantastically bad (A little anecdote here… As I waited
in line for over 30 minutes just to buy a ticket [remember,
this is October not August when it is likely five times worse], an
announcement came over the loud speaker in four languages telling us that
for our safety, we all had to leave the building immediately while security
dealt with an unspecified situation. We had all invested a lot of time waiting
in that line and not a single one of us flinched. Even the dad with his three
small children stood his ground. Since the ticket window was still selling
tickets and security wasn’t making any effort to herd us out the door,
I gambled that it was safe to sit tight and not forfeit my precious spot in
line. In fact, when there was no follow-up to the security announcement, I
started to suspect that it was all just a sneaky ploy by the Louvre personnel
to trick loitering people into leaving in order to free up more space.). If
you truly want to thoroughly conquer the entire Louvre, I’d estimate
that you’d need a minimum of three days and Mother Theresa-like patience
and determination. The place is filled to the rafters and beyond with an immeasurable
number of ancient, important, historical pieces of art. Each and every piece
in each and every room is priceless and especially after dropping seven Euros
to get in, you tend to start out with the intention of really getting your
money’s worth and seeing and learning about a lot of really cool shit.
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What happened to their noses? |
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Like my visit 10 years earlier, I started out slow. I walked
leisurely from room to room, stopping to admire and read about every single
item. I went through the Medieval Louvre (the Roman-era structure and moat
that was discovered beneath the Louvre building that has been excavated and
preserved), then Mesopotamia and part way through 18th – 19th Century
French Sculptures. This took me over an hour and upon consulting the exhibit
map I determine that I had only covered one little section of one level of
the Louvre. I kicked it up a notch by only stopping to read about a few prominent
pieces in each room. Using this approach I managed to clamor through 5th –
18th Century French Sculptures, Antique Iran, Pharaonic Egypt, Pre-Classical
Greece, Greek Antiquities and Roman Antiquities. This took another hour and
a half at which point I estimated that I had covered 9% of the Louvre. Counting
the time I spent in line to buy a ticket, I had been in the Louvre for over
three hours. I was getting hungry, tired, sleepy and very sick of shoulder-to-shoulder
crowds. So, I shifted into over-drive where I just blasted through every room
without slowing down and only stopped for the Louvre highlights. In this manner
I hurtled through Arts of Africa, Asia, Oceana, and the Americas, Napoleon
III Apartments, Michelangelo’s “The Dying Slave,” Canova’s
“Psyche and Cupid,” and the granddaddy of ‘em all, Leonardo
di Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” This took another hour and by the
time I had finished, I figured that I had covered just over 25% of the Louvre.
This is where I threw in the towel. Despite being a once in a lifetime opportunity
(actually, twice in a lifetime, in my case. Pthhhhhht!) to see these
tremendous artifacts, I no longer had the energy or interest to roam for another
four to six hours admiring precious, historic works of art. I left, picked
up a spinach quiche and took a nap.
I was awakened in the early evening and informed that I was
going to see the late show at the Moulin Rouge that night with a group of
people from the hotel. The Rouge, which was conveniently located only about
three blocks from the Andre Gill, has been featuring mostly naked cabaret
shows three times a night since 1889, but the resurgence since the film was
released with that dreamy Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, has made the show
more popular than ever. We got in line for the 11:30PM show at 10:30PM. Paris
was getting colder by the day and I briefly debated the wisdom of standing
outside, at night, freezing to death, in line for an hour just to see some
jiggling boobies, but to our surprise, the theatre staff herded everyone indoors
where instead of freezing we roasted in the collective body heat that 400
people in a small lobby could generate while we waited for the doors to open.
Not having reservations and dressed the way backpackers tend
to dress, probably contributed to us being placed in the last row of the theatre.
We were nevertheless treated with great care. The tickets were 63 Euros ($74.12),
so even us dregs in the back row were paying enough to be doted on. We were
cordially served Champaign as the lights went down. They launched the show
with several back-to-back dance routines featuring anywhere from one to 20
sets of naked ta-tas. The dancing was sub-par and several of the men seemed
to have amusing rhythm deficiencies. I’ve seen tighter chorus line choreography
at free shows in Las Vegas. Some of the costumes were very cool, though the
select few whose costumes consisted of more than a g-string seemed to have
been designed in the Eighties and had not been updated. There were a lot of
sequins, lycra, and the tailoring of all the clothing was laughably out of
style. I, of course, would have never noticed this on my own. I only learned
these facts through the three women that were with me who critiqued everything
from waistline cuts (too high) to who was icing and rouging their nipples.
I was starting to get a little perturbed at the thought of watching
90 minutes of this type of entertainment, but deliverance came when the first
of several solo acts came out. The interlude performers were, in order of
appearance, a balancing artist, a percussionist/juggler (!) and a very schlocky
ventriloquist. I was fairly impressed with the juggler, but there was no question
that the final solo act got the biggest reaction from all of us. It was a
one-woman swimming ballet. The woman came out and stood on the edge of a transparent
pool that rose out of the stage. She was wearing a g-string and nothing else.
As the pool finished rising, we immediately became aware of the two anacondas
that were swimming around the pool. The woman jumped in and proceeded to swim
and dive and spin around while draping the snakes all over herself. At first
we were all freaking out, but after a few minutes it became clear that she
was in no danger. In fact, whenever one of the anacondas could wriggle away
from the woman’s gasp it would make a break for the edge of the pool
and try to slither out to safety. The edge of the pool had an overhang that
prevented their escape and the woman would eventually grab them and yank them
back into the action.
The show climaxed to the best of its abilities and we were ushered
out of the theatre, past the gift shop where programs were being sold for
12 Euros and t-shirts for 40 Euros. The gift shop didn’t do much business.
The next day marked the end of my clueless, seat-of-my-pants
approach to traveling. I had traveled for nearly four months without a guidebook
after discarding that useless copy of “Frommer’s Europe,”
so I was thrilled to come into the ownership of a lightly used copy of “Lonely
Planet - Europe on a Shoestring.” This was an indescribably welcome
acquisition. Not only did it have pertinent history and background on all
of the cities and sights, but it had endless recommendations for hostels which
had become a mild problem after it became clear that the Hostelworld.com reservation
system was not functioning with any level of reliability. Nearly all of the
searches that I had performed on their web site in the prior two months had
revealed no available beds, anywhere. This of course was total bull, so I
had taken to just showing up in some cities with no reservation and no inkling
as to where I was going to sleep that night. Occasionally I had the name and
address of a hostel that another traveler had raved about, but that was about
as good as it got. Even though high season was winding down and full hostels
were rare, I was nevertheless a little edgy about not having a bed waiting
for me when I got off the train/bus/plane and I was delighted to have that
source of unease bounced out of the equation. The Lonely Planet book was the
size and weight of a gold brick, but it was priceless information and I cherished
having it at my disposal.
The hotel budget issue came to a head by my third night in Paris.
Having my own room in the Andre Gill was a huge perk, but the 40 Euros that
I was paying per night was starting to hurt. Plus, the hotel staff seemed
to be getting progressively more ornery and less helpful on each passing day,
culminating on my last night when I heard no less than three confrontations
in the lobby between unhappy guests and hotel staff, with the staff refusing
to do anything to rectify even basic problems like a burnt out light bulb.
The staff mantra for inaction was “I’m not the manager. I can’t
do anything”
I took a long walk around the neighborhood and eventually found
the Caulaincourt Hotel, an affordable place that wasn’t booked solid
and they had a desk crew that was a veritable joy to hand fistfuls of cash
to. After I nearly died climbing to the fourth floor with my bags I was deeply
disillusioned to see that my dorm room had seven men in it. Having seven guys
in the same room meant certain disaster. First, I could count on an absolutely
filthy shower and sink area. Second, by this point, I was all too familiar
with the matrix illustrating the chances of one or more people in a room being
freakish snoring machines increasing ten-fold for every man added into the
mix. I was a bit sleep deprived at this point and I didn’t think I had
the reserve to absorb another poor night’s sleep. To make matters worse,
it was a Friday night, so chances were pretty good that at least half my roommates
would be out digging the Paris nightlife until obscene hours. In lieu of these
potential sleep disruptions, I took every precaution legally available to
ensure I would sleep like a dead dog. I took the bed in the far corner, so
no one would be climbing over me when they got in late or went to the bathroom
in the middle of the night. I screwed in my ear plugs as far as they would
go without causing blindness or involuntary leg spasms. Then I took a little
white pill from a bottle that had been prescribed to me a while back for my
insomnia. I had been hauling the stuff all around Europe and I had totally
forgotten that I had packed it until I stumbled upon it earlier that afternoon.
Turns out I didn’t need prescription help. While there was some minor
commotion when the clubbers staggered in late, unbelievably, not a single
one of us snored. I got up to take a whiz at about 6:00AM and the room was
as silent as a Memphis Grizzlies pepfest. I couldn’t even detect anyone
breathing. It was amazing.
By my fourth day in Paris my budget was taking a serious ass
whooping. I barely needed to bother putting my money neatly in my wallet after
each visit to the cash machine, considering the very short relationship that
I was having with my Euros. I visited the cash machine approximately every
third day and withdrew at least 200 Euros each time. And that didn’t
count the charges that I was putting on my Visa. It was out of control, but
there was nothing I could do. I wanted to know where these guys were that
were writing books with titles like “Paris on 50 Cents a Day”
or whatever. Up to this point, the best book I could have written would have
been something like “Paris on $80 a Day.” Of course with my determination
to do all of the cool and decidedly not cheap things in Paris, piled on top
of inordinately large accommodations and food bills, I really had it coming
to me.
Speaking of cool, incredibly uncheap things… Since I was
forking out big money in Paris, I decided to push the non-stop splurging on
what was probably the most fantastic thing I had done all year. There’s
an American-run business called Mike’s Bike Tours running in four cities
in Europe (Amsterdam, Munich, Barcelona and Paris) and I had been hearing
glowing reviews about these tours since I first encountered them in Munich
back in July. With Paris being the last locale I was going to visit with this
service and several people at my hotel jabbering about how great it was, I
dropped into the Mike’s Bike Tour office to get the skinny on a tour
and use their clean, free bathroom. While I was there, the whole idea of a
bike tour vanished like Bush’s approval points when I saw the eight
Segways parked in the corner of the shop.
If you’ve been living in the jungles of New Guinea for the past two
years, you may have missed out on the blizzard of free publicity that the
Segway people have received for their new vehicle. A Segway is a revolutionary
two wheeled, self balancing, personal transportation device. An internal gyroscope
and numerous lightning quick processors keeps the Segway and the person driving
it upright while they cruise lazily and enviably down the road at speeds up
to 12.5 MPH (It’s rumored that a souped up Segway can go up to 30 MPH,
but apparently going that fast on a Segway is scary as hell). The Segway is
slowly being introduced into urban areas in the U.S. with mail carriers and
street cops in several cities testing them for professional use. There has
been some fierce debate on how and if the vehicle should be used in a typical
urban environment. Should they be forced to stay on the sidewalks, bike paths
or streets? Should people on Segways adhere to traffic laws like cars, etc,
etc? None of that mattered while I was standing in Mike’s Bike Tours
shop. All I knew when I saw those things parked there was that it was imperative
that I get on one immediately.
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Mike’s Bike Tours were the first to bring Segways into
France and still appear to be the only Segway game in town. The Segways drew
a lot of stares on the street. If the oh-wow factor weren’t enough for
bystanders when you zipped past them with surprising speed and maneuverability
on something that God never intended to stand up without a kick stand, when
you stopped on a dime and whipped through a full 360º turn with zero
turning radius, onlookers literally went to pieces. At every tourist sight
we visited, people stopped looking at whatever hundreds of years old historic
monument they were standing in front of and turned their cameras on us. In
addition to that attention, we had a camera crew from the American Tech TV
network following us on our tour that day (apparently the Segways have attracted
more free media attention to Mike’s Bike Tours than a Dennis Rodman
birthday party). The poor Tech TV cameraman and sound guy chased us on foot
and in their car through the Paris city streets for the entire four hour tour,
while the producer wisely chose to mount a Segway and take the tour herself.
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Segways are the most intuitive and easy to learn means of transportation
that I have ever navigated. Easier than a car. Way easier than a
bike. Even easier than an electric wheelchair. The forward and backward motion
of the Segway is triggered by leaning forward or backward. Standing still
requires that you keep the foot platform perfectly horizontal. Hence, all
that it takes to pilot a Segway is a very basic sense of balance (I’m
talking normal, walking and standing in one place kind of basic balance).
You steer by twisting a switch on the left handlebar (twist forward to turn
right, back to turn left). The learning curve on a Segway varies from 30 seconds
for a relatively gifted person up to 10 minutes for a nervous, drunk, but
either way, after about 20 minutes the thing feels like a natural extension
of your body. Starting, stopping, spinning around, backing and turning, one
handed while shooting pictures can all be performed as if it were second nature.
In fact, the only mildly delicate part about using a Segway is the mount and
dismount. Since any leaning activates motion, if your mount/dismount is less
than steady, the thing can either speed away right out of your hands or lurch
backward and smash your shins. While standing still, there’s the smallest
perceptible swaying back and forth as you and your Segway work like symbiotic
entities to stay still and upright, otherwise it’s pretty much like
standing directly on the ground with your own two feet. You don’t even
need to hold the handle bars while you are idling and once you get the ‘nads
for it, you can even cruise at full speed with no hands until a turn is required.
Your can inch ahead at the slowest possible crawl for delicate maneuvering
or lean into near instantaneous full speed acceleration. The Segway will start
to complain if you get ballsy like I did 45 seconds after my first mount and
start going full speed in reverse into tight turns, otherwise you are only
limited by your confidence and the speed range that you have selected.
There are three pace setting on a Segway. You select your speed
range when you start the thing up. You have three color-coded keys and each
key allows for a different maximum speed. Black will keep you at 6 MPH per
hour or less, perfect for winding through dense, slack jawed crowds at tourist
sights. If you have relatively bare open road in front of you, then you key
it up with the yellow and sail away at about 8 MPH. If you are in a serious
hurry, whip out the red key and you can rev it up to 12.5 MPH. We did most
of the tour on the black key. With the number of people that were crowding
us and the knobs who inexplicably felt that it was safe to jump directly in
front of us to get a better look at the Segways, we really couldn’t
have gone any faster without flattening some toes. When it came time to head
back to the shop and we were only going down deserted streets, we restarted
with the yellow key and covered serious ground. Once we were back at the shop,
the red key was offered to anyone who was feeling fearless. Not surprisingly,
all of us guys were up for it while the ladies hung back and let the boys
work through their respective testosterone moments. When it was my turn to
red key it, I wasn’t prepared for the acceleration. On the surface,
12.5 MPH really doesn’t seem like much. I’ve gone just as fast
(actually much faster) on a bicycle, but for some reason the same speeds on
a Segway seem much more frightening. I had a mission to accomplish while red
keying it. Mike’s Bike Tours does not take credit cards, so a visit
to a cash machine was in order. Having been a veritable Segway prodigy, they
felt I was a safe bet to get to the cash machine and back on the red key without
killing someone’s child, pet or myself. I stepped onto my Segway, glanced
at my group, raised an eyebrow into a menacing position and tilted that mother
from zero to 12.5 MPH in about .5 seconds. I was tearing down the sidewalk.
The Segway was bucking back into me, a physical signal the Segway automatically
gives you when you are pushing it faster than your selected key range will
allow, but I was red keying it, so I was probably, in fact, very close to
pushing it’s physical limitations. I was coming to an open courtyard
where skater punks and tiny dogs were running free when we had cut through
it earlier that day, so I eased up. Once I was sure the coast was clear, I
laid rubber back to max speed. It was a glorious geek moment. I traveled the
two blocks to the cash machine in seconds. I requested 250 Euros and the machine
spit out a twenty and 23 tens. Cursing, I stuffed the cash wad into my wallet
and floored it back to the shop. Despite being one of the least essential
items for survival (in the hunter-gatherer sense of the concept, a la “Fight
Club”), I decided that was going to own a Segway before I died. In fact,
“Paris Segway Tour Guide” was immediately added to my New-Career-Option-if-I-Don’t-Make-it-in-Writing
list.
Oh yeah, there was a tour guide too. Ryan. Nice guy. A recent
college graduate who obviously dug the Segways and the attention they generated.
He spoke to us at every sight, but with the Segway consuming all of my attention,
I hardly remember any of the details, with the exception of the forehead slapping
revelation of the secret side entrance to the Louvre - about 100 yards away
from the long lines leading into the Pyramid entrance - where people in-the-know
could blow past all the Rubes (i.e. me two days earlier) and walk right into
the Museum with no wait.
The Segway buzz stayed with me well into the evening. I couldn’t
stop babbling about it to my roommates and I immediately loaded my digital
pictures and video clips from the tour into my laptop and held a little multimedia
Segway presentation for anyone who would watch.
The next day I dropped myself into the other end of the emotional
spectrum when I got several lifetimes worth of the creeps shaken out of me
in the Paris Catacombs. Back in 1785, when the Plague was in full swing, the
Parisians decided that they needed to free up some room for all of the people
dropping dead by exhuming the remains from six million graves in
the overflowing cemeteries and piling them up neatly in the tunnels of disused
quarries beneath the city. Now it’s a spine-chilling tourist sight.
After paying five Euros I descended about four stories into
the Earth down a spiral staircase which opened up at the bottom into the weakly
lit, eerie catacombs. The first four hundred yards of the catacombs were just
plain, dark, cement corridors. I remember thinking that they didn’t
look much different from the corridors at the Fed, except that a typical stroll
down the Fed hallways made me feel a heck of a lot more dread than the Paris
Catacombs. After a disappointing amount of time seeing nothing but bare, cement
corridors, I was beginning to assume that all those bones were walled up behind
the cement. So the remains of six million people were behind those walls.
Big fricking whoop. I just paid five Euros to imagine what that looked
like, something I could have done for free in a café while snacking
on pastry and a Latte. I was going to have a bone to pick (Bwa ha ha ha!)
with whoever was manning the exit. But the shocker was waiting for me at about
the half way point. I went through a doorway and suddenly the walls were no
longer bare cement blocks. I was surrounded by floor-to-ceiling, tightly packed,
piles of bones. The bones were arranged neatly into different patterns along
the walls. It was unnerving. I pulled myself together, took a few pictures
and kept walking. I walked for a very long time. The bones were never-ending.
While walking, I passed several gated catacomb arteries leading off in different
directions from the main corridor and I could clearly see through the gates
that these routes were also completely filled with bones, extending off into
the indefinite distance. I hadn’t given it much thought before that
moment, but six million skeletons can fill up a heck of a lot of catacombs.
After seeing a dozen gated off, branching corridors teeming with yet more
bones my case of the willies peaked. Clearly I was only seeing one, small
part of the bone-filled passageways. Every time I tried to back up a little
to get a photo of a certain bone pile, I would back right into another stack
of bones. The sheer volume of bones I was seeing was astounding. Signs forbade
me to take flash pictures in the catacombs, but the place was very dark and
my hand was nowhere near steady enough for non-flash, long exposure shots
so I was naughty a few times and flipped on the flash. The tour path went
on for what seemed like six or seven city blocks. The distance I was covering
was made evident as every hundred yards or so there was a plaque stating what
street was directly overhead. After what seemed like an eternity of disturbing,
dimly lit, bone corridors I emerged into a well lit room with yet another
four story spiral staircase leading back up to street level. Once on the street,
I blinked and shrunk from the sunlight. I felt like I had been under ground
for months, but it had only been about 30 minutes. I staggered around in circles
to get my bearings and find a metro entrance while I shook off the lingering
shivers of what I had seen. What on Earth made me want to see that horrendous
place in the first place? Oh yeah, several hotel companions. Swift payback
of some sort was definitely in order. Meanwhile, there was little question
in my mind that the experience would end up being juicy nightmare material
some time in the near future.
Paris still seems to consider itself the fashion center of the
universe, no matter how ungainly those fashion choices may be. For example,
four inch, needlepoint high heels, the modern world’s most uncomfortable
fashion trend, seems to be back in full swing in Paris. These heels are so
high that they require women to buy whole new assemblies of pants that have
an extra three inches in the inseam. I don’t get this at all. One, you
are wearing heels that are damaging multiple parts of your feet, legs and
spine all at once. Two, then you buy pants with an extra long inseam that
cover up the goddamn precious, shoes that you are working so hard
to have on your feet in the first place. What’s the point? I will never
understand women. Though I have to admit, watching women run in those shoes
without twisting an ankle and causing a rotary, multiple bone fracture was
like watching that maniac go over Niagara Falls with no protection and live.
It was beyond belief.
 |
Several of the legendary “Paris-sights” (Say it
fast. Hee hee!) were dutifully covered during my stay. The Eiffel Tower was
as imposing as I remembered and so were the lines to get to the top. Having
already seen fantastic high views of Paris from the Sacre Coeur, La Defense
and my room on the top floor of the Caulaincourt, I skipped the debilitating
line and moved on to the Arc de Triomphe, smack dab in the middle of the largest
roundabout in the world. I checked my sanity for a second and briefly considered
snatching up the bragging rights for having made the mad dash through about
eight lanes of traffic to the Arc’s base. Then I reviewed my traveler’s
insurance agreement and found out that I was not covered for minor injuries.
I would need to severe a limb or require neurosurgery to be covered by the
policy, so I took the sensible route to the base through the underground tunnel.
I made obligatory strolls down the Champs-Élysées and through
the Latin quarter even though there was nothing to see but hoitty toitty boutiques
and over-priced cafés. I timed my stop at Notre Dame for the 2:30 tour
in English, but I only got halfway through it before the incredibly long narratives
on the religious significance of every nook in the wall bored me into paralysis.
I scrambled through Cimetière du Père Lachaise, the most visited
cemetery in the world, to pay my respects to Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde.
I walked past the Hôtel des Invalides, formerly a home for disabled
veterans that now houses Napoleon’s tomb, situated in such a way that
you have to crouch into a kneeling position to get a good look at it. That
little, pony riding, egomaniacal bastard is still making people bow down to
him over 130 years after his death. Finally, I didn’t bother wasting
time on the apparent multi-city, ongoing practical joke that is the Picasso
Museum after the enlightenment I had back in Barcelona.
On my last marathon day of walking through Paris, I happened
to look down for an instant and saw a peculiar white spot on one of my Merrell
hiking shoes. I sat down to investigate. I was horrified to find that it was
my sock poking through a small hole where the tread on the front
tip of the shoe was separating from the rest of the body. I was mortified.
Back in May when I forked over big coin for the shoes, I thought of it as
the beginning of a long-term relationship. I had spent much less on hiking
boots in the past and had them last for an average of two years - wearing
them through fall, winter and spring – while stomping them through the
unremitting Minnesota muck. When I splurged on the Merrells I imagined that
I would be buried with them, but here they were falling apart on me less than
five months later. I got curious and checked the trend. I stared for several
minutes. The near two inch thick, slab of super gripping rubber that had looked
nearly indestructible when they were brand new looked as if they had been
used as brake pads for inter-city French trains. Several spots on the bottom
were reduced to a pathetic, smooth, textureless surfaces where there had once
been fat, protruding molars of tread separated by cavernous gaps, with multi-layered,
smaller, spiky protuberances that looked as if they could handle a walk up
a 90 degree incline. In fact there were patches where the yellow, second,
thinner layer of rubber was erupting through the black first layer. I studied
this in disbelief. Either Merrell had duped me into buying very substandard
shoes or I had put more miles on the shoes in four and a half months than
I had in any prior two or three year span of my shoe wearing life. With my
feet throbbing from the day’s trek, I was pretty sure that it was the
later.
While we’re on the subject of clothing, my new Columbia
jacket was working nicely. I had gotten a system down for the pockets and
their contents. The inside, breast (huhuh, huh, huh, huh!) pocket housed my
camera and random 3 ½ inch floppies for impromptu saving of desirable
web information. The outer, left, side pocket kept my gloves. The right side
kept the map of whatever city I was in and my 50 centiliter, heavy-duty, plastic
Coke bottle that I had been using as a water bottle since Copenhagen (the
Danish are serious about their Coke bottles). The outer, left, breast pocket
was where I stored various brochures and city information and the right pocket
held my James Bond, push button, collapsible umbrella. With all that crap
in the pockets, the jacket appeared to put about 40 pounds on me, but I was
well stocked and ready for any eventuality and I didn’t have to carry
a day bag anymore.
My “Walk-Everywhere-Possible-So-You-Don’t-Miss-Anything”
approach to tackling a new city is just begging for a repetitive stress injury
in a city like Paris. I had been trying to be conscious of the state of my
delicate feet since I had gotten them as close to healthy as possible in Lagos,
but Paris was so huge that a carefully planned three hour stroll could turn
into a five to seven hour death march after a few chores, tangents and getting
lost were tacked onto the itinerary. I ultimately spent eight days in Paris,
longer than any other city on my voyage, and aside from the Segway day, I
walked pretty much continuously each day. At the end of every day, the trudge
up the hill to the Caulaincourt Hotel and then the climb to my fourth floor
room became progressively more difficult until my last day when I thought
foot cramps and failing calve muscles were going to force me to spend the
night on the second floor landing. I actually considered just laying down
and using my jacket as a pillow. Maybe just for a little nap, just to rest.
It was the 50 centiliters of red wine talking of course. I struggled up the
last few flights and reassessed my determination to walk everywhere. But salvation
was in sight. Three out of my four planned destinations in Switzerland (Bern,
Geneva and Interlaken), were the size of Lego villages compared to Paris.
I would spend short, lazy days walking the three hundred yard perimeter or
so that comprised the noteworthy portions of those cities. But first I had
to get through Lyons and Nice (with day trips to Monaco, Cannes and Saint
Tropez), not cake-walks by any stretch of the imagination.
As my time in Paris was winding up I had to admit the unthinkable…
I really liked Paris. What with the eternal stereotypes of their
elitist attitudes and my less than hospitable nine days there in the rainy,
crabby summer of ’93, I was fully expecting to be run out of town in
the cargo hold of Contempt Airlines in just a few short days. But I had a
great time. The food was fantastic. The sights were amazing. The people were
nice. Polite. Even friendly. It was weird. It was like going to Marrakech
and having the hustlers ignore me.
I did have one issue to nitpick though... I got a very bad haircut
while I was there. In Paris. In the gay section,
arguably the style and hotness nucleus of the planet. How was this possible?
I thought I’d come out of that place looking like fricking Zoolander,
but I looked more like a Norwegian Mr. Spock. Someone had some explaining
to do, but my budget couldn’t take another day in Paris for me to track
down the proper authorities. So, I bought a hat, jumped on an incredibly fast
train and headed south to Lyons.
Go to Lyon
