Distance cycled: 5km (On Velib bikes with
Jodie, Dave and Roz.)
Number of chills up my spine: 26
Number of metro journeys: 3
Number of spiral steps down to Catacombs:
130
Highlight: Seeing a girl on the back of a
scooter, carrying a picture frame on her shoulder. How French do
you get? See picture here.
Lowlight: Walking 30 minutes west, when I
thought I was walking east. I really need to buy a compass.
Unless you've come straight from Via Napoleone in Milan or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, chances are
you'll feel a bit daggy in Paris. I overheard an American woman
last night say, "The French must have great hair and bad
eyes", referring to the multitude of hairdressers and
optometrists in Paris. It's true, not a hair is out of place as
they look at you through their oh-so-chic eyewear - it's chic on
them but you know if you tried that look you'd end up looking like
Ugly Betty.
It was quite an experience to leave the fashionistas for a
moment and dip beneath the boulevards to the Paris Catacombs, and underground Ossuary. Paris
has a deeper and stranger connection to its underground than almost
any city with hundreds of miles of tunnels include all kinds of
spaces: canals and reservoirs, crypts and bank vaults, wine cellars
transformed into nightclubs and galleries. Some six
million skeletons reside here, nearly three times the
population of the city above. Their skeletons were exhumed from
overcrowded cemeteries in the 18th and 19th centuries and literally
poured into old quarry tunnels. It's like something straight out of
a horror movie.
I was expecting a room full of bones but what I found was
kilometres of tunnels with bones stacked to at least eye level. At
first it's shocking, then you find yourself morbidly curious and
after 20 minutes or so I got a lot more comfortable with the whole
thing.
We spend our whole lives trying to modifying our exterior look,
be it with fashion, food or in extreme cases, plastic surgery. But
essentially we're all exactly the same underneath. I know it
shouldn't take 6 million skeletons for me to understand this fact
but it really brought it home. I couldn't tell if someone was a
hipster or a hippy from their skeleton, in fact I was hard pressed
to decide if they were male or female, let alone the colour of
their skin.
When I resurfaced about an hour later and joined the tourist
throngs I couldn't help but look at each person, picturing the
skeletal frame they were hiding under makeup, clothes, skin and
muscle. It's easy to be intimidated or afraid of someone because
they are different to you but there's something quite reassuring to
know at the end of the day we're all cut from the same cloth.