1/16/2024

Ok. Big day. We did, in fact, do too much this day, but oh well. JA made the mistake of listening to me/letting me lead and, well, we saw a lot. And realized we’re getting old. And are out of shape. But whatever, we got to see all kinds of cool stuff.

Our first stop of the day was the Catacombs!

Kind off. Our trip on the metro train was a bit quicker than I expected and our entrance time was at 10:30am, so we killed time walking around the area a bit.

These signs are how you find the entrance to catch the train/subway around town. Very cool and very easy to find. Not every single entrance had these, but the majority where we were seemed to.

Around 10:20 we headed to the entrance to show our tickets and headed in. You walk down a lot of steps in a spiral staircase to get to the tunnel underground that leads to the Catacombs. And then it’s a long walk through the tunnel, which are lit well enough. I would not recommend going to these if you’re claustrophobic in any way though.

I’m not sure what these are. Markers of some sort, obviously, but we didn’t opt for the audio-tour headphones on this trip. Mostly because I wanted to just be down in the environment without additional distractions. I’m sure there was a lot of information we missed out on, but there is a virtual tour available online.

The tunnels went on for a long time. Probably half our time underground was spent in bare tunnels.

This was an area closed off to us that obviously goes further below. Unfortunately it’s off limits because it’s fragile and people suck.

Finally at the entrance.

Lots of warnings about ‘do not touch the bones’ all over. You’d think this would be common sense, but again, people suck.

Walls and walls and walls of bones. So many leg bones. I know they said the remains of ‘millions’ are down here, but the sheer amount of just leg bones to form the walls is incredible. And piled behind the front wall, so many more bones.

Here is where I think my cell phone does not compete with my normal camera.

Walls taller than JA. And the tunnels just go on and on. I had no idea of the scope – from what I had read, I thought we’d go through a single straight tunnel and that was it. But what we got to see seemed pretty expansive. And I can’t even imagine how big it really is – there were so many additional tunnels that branched off that were locked from visitors.

Some rot is getting to these. It’s very pretty, in a morbid kind of way.

Some mold/humidity creeping in. Along with some really neat little red pill bugs/rolly pollies.

I think this graffiti, but I’m not sure. It was a single skull in a headstone.

There were a number of children skulls in here too. I know it’s logical that there should be, but it was a bit odd to see them. I don’t think I’ve included any of those photos though – I’m not particularly good at judging age, but I think the one skull at the bottom in this picture was possibly an adolescent or young adult, not quite a child, but still pretty young.

This is the last part of the Catacombs – a ‘decorative’ pillar near the exit.

Found out a long-stair-climb and a few minutes later this hole opened up in the gift shop.

After this, we caught the metro to head over to the Eiffel Tower. The stop that we’d normally take to walk to the ET is closed currently, so we went stop further, over the river. We ended up in what was obviously a very rich neighborhood and wandered our way back to the river.

Had to take a picture of this. They’re so accommodating of bicycles out there, this is so you can just roll your bike up/down the stairs.

This was some goofy art piece that I couldn’t help but want to see. Seriously, who thinks of two shrimps forming a heart to make into a sizeable statue? And then of course the weirdos who think it’s picture worthy.

Tourist season is well over. They’re packing up the carousel.

This is a security line to get under the Eiffel Tower. Just a bag check and metal scanner. We won’t be going up to the top today because it’s closed for maintenance. They were still letting folks go up to the middle section, but we figured what’s the point? We’ll just save it for next time.

Super cool structure. I knew it was massive, but just walking underneath it was kind of mindblowing.

On our way to find the next metro station to our next stop, where the Tour de France concludes every year (it’d be so cool to ride a bike around it one day), we managed to find all the other tourists.

And a bunch of locks on fences. Not sure here’s room for more. Also, we’re getting hungry, all we had to eat today was a couple of pastries this morning. Thankfully the metro has a small stand with snacks.

Insert inappropriate joke about foreskin here. Yes, JA made it, I was amused enough to need to take a picture. It was a pretty damn good hot dog in a baguette. Blew everything we ate in Cyprus out of the water if you need a reference for how ‘meh’ the food was there.

The next stop, the Arc De Triomphe!

That’s a penis. Based on all the art-penises I saw on this trip, seems like the majority of males are growers, not showers.

Also, the 12 year olds in us really couldn’t help it with the dirty jokes after. Definitely looks like that dude is doing something other than actually blowing a horn.

JA for scale. We didn’t go up to the top of the Arc – the view was probably neat, but we’ve got other things to do.

Like go to the science and technology museum, Musee des Arts de Metiers, that has some neat stuff, including some of the original standards of measurement, supposedly.

Look at these fancy microscopes. Ours in the lab is neat looking, but it’s not pretty…maybe I need to make some demands…

One of the very first hard drives. It’s huge, taller than me.

Huge electron microscope. I don’t even know why you need that many buttons.

This is kind of crazy to see here, straight from my home state.

Clacks! Well, a semaphore tower, but in the Discworld, clacks! GNU Terry Pratchett. “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.” From Going Postal. I’ve never seen these before other than pictures, so this was extra neat to me.

This is a photograph gun. For taking pictures.

JA for scale again. Biggest bearing I’ve ever seen.

A flying machine based on a bat.

A Foucault’s pendulum. Not his original – this is used for demonstrations – but one of the originals is displayed behind it in a cabinet.

We’re pretty worn out by this point. We sat for a bit until the museum was getting close to closing time before venturing out to grab something to eat near by (a croque madam and then another fresh-baked absolutely-heavenly chocolate croissant). There was a bar nearby that I wanted to visit, mostly definitely an overpriced swanky place, but I figured we should have at least a couple ridiculous and over priced cocktails while in Paris.

And we did. The ‘bar’ held maybe 20 people tops, the whole thing was wonderfully pretentious, and the cocktails were definitely overpriced. But they were unique and neat! This whole place, the Little Red Door, was somewhere that would absolutely thrive in Austin in it’s current state. They’ve got probably 10ish original cocktails that change out every few months (they can make ‘normal’ cocktails if you really want to pay their prices for that, but I’d say go somewhere else), based on various foods. So you’d order a ‘tomato’ or a ‘pepper’ themed cocktail. Our first round were based on ‘melon’ and ‘key lime’ and were probably the best cocktails you could get at that point there. They were a mix of liquor and wine and other things from what I could tell. The melon was my favorite, they even spritzed it with some sort of melony-smelling ‘perfume’ that I want. The ones pictured above are the ‘pumpkin’ which definitely tasted pumpkin, not pumpkin spice, and ‘apple’ which tasted like a decent, but basic, apple cider. They did put some neat pumpkin-meringue on one and a weird apple-gummy thing on the other.

Yep, you guessed it, JA for scale. I’m not even sure that door is functional (the actual door is to the left).

This is the station you wait for the train in where we were. Really pretty. And fairly clean. We had four drinks total at the Little Red Door, rested our legs, and decided we needed more drinks closer to our hotel. So we turned into an ‘Austin night’ by hitting up a heavy metal themed bar that had decorations based on Alien, Predator, and Tank Girl. And really good cheaper drinks. And yes, they played metal music the whole time.

After that last drink (vodka and this really nice sweet beer mixed with some other stuff, we headed back to the hotel, stopping only for a to-go bo bun to share back in our room.