Mais oui, Paris! 🇫🇷

We arrived in Paris on Canada Day 🇨🇦, groggy from our night flights and vulnerable to all the baked goods, and —oh mon doux!— the AirBnb wasn’t ready. 🫣 We hung around a nearby café, then eventually talked to the cleaner, who was almost done, but had to run a quick errand to buy more towels. The beds were barely made when we flopped out. The cleaner let herself back in, did the last of the cleaning, and let herself out to the sound of all four of us snoring, sain et sauf! 😴  

        When we got ourselves back on track, we made the most of our convenient location in the Latin quarter, across from a Sorbonne campus. Notre Dame was around the corner, and we used our Catholic Fast Pass to get a mass in. The priest’s homily was solid and unpretentious, with a focus on living and loving life…. same message as Bad Bunny’s music basically. Tourists walked around the cathedral with solemnity and snuck a few pics of the faithful in action. 

    Day Two took a macabre turn as we toured the famous Paris Catacombs. We descended a spiral staircase 20m to the former quarry, under the city in dimly lit tunnels. Eery music played in our headsets and we listened to stories of how the place came to be. A few twists and turns down further corridors of yore, and we got to the ossuary. Truly, wow. Bones of millions of deceased Parisians backfill the quarry and become supportive walls. The bulbous ends of femurs and tibiae are stacked in tessellating rows, bracketed by rows of skulls. The empty sockets of the eyes, noses and mouths call silently: I was someone. I was a real person. You too, eh? The halls curve on forever. On the walls, there are thoughtful quotations -- some poetry, some religious, some historical. Despite the initial creepiness, it's a wonderful place for reflection on the meaning of life... and the heavy metal aesthetic. We got about 20,000 steps in and eventually exited to a whimsical gift shop. No regrets. 

    Back on the level of the living, we spent a fun night on Champ de Mars, the big field facing the Eiffel Tower with a few thousand others. We had a drinks and snacks, took a bunch of photos, saw the tower light-show, and just enjoyed the scene.  

    Another day, we went to the Musée D'Orsay where we saw masterpieces of art. We also took a quick jaunt through the Galeries Haussmann, which is obviously a lot to take in -- the macarons, the architecture, the designer brands, the prices(!), the rooftop. At some point we got in a visit to the Paris Panthéon, and saw the graves of some legit GOATS, like Louis Braïlle, Marie & Pierre Curie, Josephine Baker, Victor Hugo, JJ Rousseau, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Voltaire, etc. Solemn and cool.

     We made the most of our stay in Paris, and it was a wonderful way to start our trip.