11-2 (Skull, Skull, Skull!)

 Day 10

This was our last day in France.  As usual, Jeff and Emily woke up insufferably early, but unlike yesterday, when they snuck out and had breakfast together without me, I woke up in time to get dressed and go with them.  The breakfast situation is bizarre, since there are tons of tourists, all chatting in three or four languages (French, English, German, and Spanish), and there's a swarm of employees running around us, trying to seat people and clear tables, as well as restock food and keep busy.  I don't know why I mentioned that--it's not at all interesting--but I'm blogging now, and trying to type whatever comes into my head.

We ran over to Disneyland as soon as it opened, grabbed a couple of final keepsakes, and what the heck, went on Phantom Manor one more time.  

We checked out of the hotel, got on a bus, took it to the train station, and took the train to Paris.  It was a madhouse at the Paris train station, and became a madder house later on that night.  It's only a city of two million people, but that probably only counts those that were riding the Metro that afternoon.

When I was coming home from my uncle's funeral last year, my niece's boyfriend told me that one day, he'd really like to go to the catacombs under Paris and see the ossuary.  To be honest, I might not have known that place existed, but sure enough, a year later, here I was, crossing off a bucket list item from his bucket list.

We had to travel from the Metro to a bus stop, then ride a crowded, impossibly-slow-moving bus through the city.  The busride through Paris was interesting because, after riding a bullet train and watching the speedometer pass 300kph, I was shocked to see us doing approximately five miles per hour, creeping along slower than the people making their way past us on scooters and bicycles.  It might have just been a busy traffic afternoon, or it might have been hell itself.  Luckily, a bunch of people got off the bus four or five minutes in, and I was able to sit down for the rest of the hour long bus ride.  Because we were going so slowly, I was able to take in both sides of the Thames when we passed over it, wondering if I was seeing that famous river or something else (I wasn’t sitting near Jeff and Emily to ask, but she told me later that it was).

Eventually, we got to the center of town (I assume it was the center, but I never knew where or when I was while in France).  We had a tour scheduled of the catacombs, but we were early and they wouldn't let us go in until the time of our appointment.  So, we sat around and watched the locals smoke until it was time for our tourist activity.

They had metal detectors and x-ray machines even for the ossuary, but I guess I understand that you're not being paranoid if people are truly out to get you.  They handed us little phone-like devices with headphones attached, to be our virtual tourguide, with various chapters marked that we were supposed to listen to when we saw the corresponding number on the walls of the underground maze.  And down, down, down the stairs we went until we were deeply underground, us and about a dozen total tourists, all speaking (and listening to) different languages.

It was cold and wet down there, and absolutely unlike anywhere you'd normally find yourself, unless you had a root cellar growing up (my grandma's house had one, and it also served as a nature sanctuary solely for spiders) that went for miles.

There was a bit of history, and a bit of spooky detail on the recordings, but you didn't really need to know the details once you got to the point where there were hundreds of bones lined up, and later, thousands piled into all sorts of different patterns.

My eight year old self would've thought this old guy was the absolute coolest.

I had, sick f**k that I am, brought my Yo-Gabba-Gabba dolls with me in my backpack, but when it came time to pose one for an Instagram photo . . . I just couldn't bear to do it.  It seemed intensely disrespectful to the dead, and indeed, to that precious bastion of modern culture that is Instagram, to take a picture of a stuffed animal with any human remains.  So instead, I took a picture by one of the supporting walls and called it good.

I did, however, consider leaving one of the stuffed animals among the bones, as some kind of offering.  But ultimately, I was worried someone would consider it a sick joke, so I took the dolls with me (and not a skull, though I certainly could have.  It astounds me that more people HAVEN'T stolen skulls*, considering they are just there, often only sitting on rows of bones, and there's no security of any kind down there.  It may be, Donald J. Trump notwithstanding, that people are just more decent than I give them credit for.

I was absolutely blown away by the sheer number of bones there--the femurs along must have numbered in the thousands, and if each one of those represented a person (or half a person, technically), we're talking the population of a whole city piled up in tight and tidy walls.  Also shocking to me was that there was no bad smell, no unpleasant odor at all, amid all that death (Jeff seemed to think that was a no-brainer, but I always equate the dead with "the funk of forty thousand years").

Yeah, that's daylight on the surface.  A chilling reminder of how far down we were.  

There were restrooms outside of the ossuary, but they were unisex.  It was the first time I'd gone in a bathroom where both men and women were in the stalls.  Not really worth mentioning, really, except I took a photo of the toilet paper dispenser, that had been "decorated" in the ossuary theme.

While we were there, Emily asked me if I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, or the Sienne River.  I had briefly seen the Sienne during the busride, but I did want to see the Eiffel Tower, if only for a minute and from a distance.  So, we got on the Metro again, took it into the part of the city where you could see the Tower, and got off.  We walked over, and you could see it for at least a mile away, but we got so close there were vendors selling miniature Towers all around us.

I suppose I ought to feel more affection for the Eiffel Tower, since it’s one of Europe’s most famous landmarks, right alongside the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Big Ben (which I was told by two different tourguides was NOT the correct name for it, and yet here I am, deliberately getting it wrong again), the Colosseum, Stonehenge, the Parthenon, and that bridge where the Spice Girls jumped their bus.  But I only know it from movies, and the fact that it’s famous for lovers young and old.

We walked down the street, surrounded by tourists, and the Tower could be seen all the way down the blocks (indeed, it had been visible from the train, long before we got to the stop).  We had about an hour to walk around and look at it, but Jeff mostly wanted to grab something to eat and to sit down.  I took a few pictures, and saw an Asian couple each taking photos of the other standing in front of it.  I went over and asked if they wanted me to take a picture of the two of them, and they reacted as though I'd asked if they needed their arses wiped.  I guess my small-town American ways are once again horribly repugnant to foreigners.  Pretty typical, actually.

There were tons of tourists there, and a big park beside the Tower, so you could have a picnic, drink some wine, wait for the lights to come on, or knock up your best gal.

The trains in Paris were increasingly full, to the point where, it was like something out of a cartoon, or a clown car.  Once we got our bags with us again, the trains were so full that we started skipping them rather than jam ourselves in like a box of crayons (the Metro has a train every two minutes), but one time, we had to climb onboard, only to have no room to stand, and I ducked out and got in the next car (which was stupid--you remember me saying I had to depend on Jeff and Emily for everything?  I didn't know where we were going or which stop was ours, or even how to ask somebody.  I texted Jeff, when I could finally get my farligging phone out of my pocket--we were that stuffed together), and he didn't text back.  At each stop, a couple of people would squeeze through the cluster and get off, but a bunch of new people would get on.  All the seats and every available space was full, to the point where I was smashed up against strangers like it was the end of the dance and "Forever Young" by Alphaville was playing, so get your PDA in while you can, kids.  We all held on to the same metal bars, and when the strain jerked, we all leaned one way or another.  I asked Jeff if Paris was always like this, and he said he'd NEVER seen the trains so full before.  So there's that.

We got to the station, tired and grouchy (a kid bumped into Jeff and he didn't even say "Oy!"), and we discovered that there had been a fire somewhere (on the tracks?  In a train?), so everything was super delayed.  And the station was so full, you couldn't sit down.  What we ended up doing was standing by a group of would-be passengers, and once someone stood up to angrily leave (to get a cab, or get on a bus, or simply to lay down on the tracks), one of us would hurry to claim their seat, then wait for another one.  I thought I'd tell you about the dude sitting next to me that kept getting up to make a phone call, so I took his bag off the floor and put it on the seat, because people would come to ask me if the seat was taken but I couldn't communicate with them, and when he'd come back he glared at me for moving his bag and the third time this happened, I seriously considered throwing his bag off the balcony or onto the nearest terminal . . . but I won't.  Eventually, they did fix the problem/put out the fire, and the trains started moving again.

I'm now on the train back to Germany.  The dude next to me is watching "Game of Thrones" on his laptop, and it's from the seasons when I was no longer watching.  I must admit I'm curious, since the whole of the cast is all together, and that didn't really happen since the first episode.  But ah well.  I saw that BULLET TRAIN movie in the summer, and what it doesn't show you is how the train shakes and twists and throws anybody walking around against the walls/seats, like it's an unpredictable carnival ride.  Having never ridden a train like that, my body kept insisting I was on a plane, and I kept wondering where my seatbelt was.  New experiences every day.

After the pain of the Paris station delays, we got to the city of Mannheim, and there was another delay.  We met an Asian lady on the train who was going to Berlin, and joy of joys, she only spoke English and not German, so Emily told her that the train about twenty minutes after ours was going to Berlin, and we helped her with her bags (she had three suitcases, for one small woman).  But our train got delayed, and eventually, the Berlin one arrived and I said, "Guys, should we make sure that lady gets on this train?"  It was good we checked, because she was waiting for us to get on ours, so she could wait twenty minutes for hers to arrive.  She got onboard before it took off, and a few minutes later, ours arrived.  It was now late at night, later than Jeff and Emily ever stay up.  But luckily, they were there to show me where to go and where to walk/hobble for the next bus, and how to pay for it, and which exit to get off on.

It was past two am when we got in, both Jeff and I coughing, and they went to bed while I blogged until 3:30 or so.  There's nothing planned for tomorrow, so we'll probably use it to rest.

*Though judging by the cranium-shaped holes in the various wall designs, a few people have made of with them over the decades.  Just not NEARLY as many as I would've guessed.  After all, some asshole had spray-painted on one of the walls (seems like Emily took a picture of a skull that had been graffitied too, though it wasn't amid the photos she sent me).