Pictures
Our fifth day in Paris was a good one. We woke up a bit late, but we needed the sleep. We’d been hanging out with three people we met our first day in Paris. Chris is from Chicago whereas Brittany and Chelsea were from Ottowa, Canada. We had been up until something like 4 in the morning hanging out in the streets (they were drinking, but I’m not a fan of wine, so I wasn’t), and then back in the hostel just talking and having fun! That night we also met Travis, who was from Australia. We also met a Spanish man, but I didn’t catch his name. I had a lot of fun discovering the cultural differences. We say “pissed” to mean angry, while Australians use it to mean drunk. Canadians really do say “eh” and “soorry”! Chicagoans really do like the Cubs a lot. Chelsea says we have an accent, but then again, I think that’s all relative!
Chuck and I went with Chris, Brittany, and Chelsea to see more of Paris. We headed out toward the Hopital d’Invalides which was built by Napoleon for injured troops, where we grabbed some breakfast. We then headed across a bridge toward the Louvre. We walked through the gardens there, which were quite impressive! We even went down inside the glass pyramid, but tickets were more than we wanted to pay, and none of us are really artists. I’ve heard from friends/family that the Mona Lisa isn’t really that great anyway. So we left there and headed off to Notre Dame.
For some reason Chuck and I seemed to be the only ones interested in seeing it, so it took us a while to convince the others to continue toward it. Once there, we met another group of Australians who took pictures of us in front of Notre Dame and we took theirs. Chuck and I headed inside to see what it was like, to take some pictures, and to look at the stained glass windows (which really were impressive). The other three just hung out at a cafe across the street. There was a little line to get in, but walking through was free, which was nice.
After that we rode the metro to get to the Catacombs! We had to wait in line for quite a while and then had to pay to get in, but it was worth it. It was something like 127 spiral steps to get down to the tunnels. For a while you just walk through a regular tunnel (just tall enough for a person my height), until you get to a sign saying the next area is consecrated. You walk through a door and boom there it is. Thousands of feet of tunnel with bones for walls. Millions of people were buried there. It’s a bit hard to think it’s even real. I have never seen so many bones in one place before. And what was even more impressive was how they were arranged. What were probably leg/arm bones were stacked several high, then a row of skull bones, then more leg bones, then another row of skulls. This repeated until it reached the ceiling. And it was like this for a long distance. There were some areas where the bones didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling, or the skulls were even in patterns. Some places you could tell where someone had tried to take bones (which they checked bags at the end for this). It was very surreal and humbling. More impressive than I imagined it would be.
Afterward, we headed back toward the hostel. While on the metro, Chris went a different way because he was staying at a different hostel for that night. Shortly after we got back Brittany and Chelsea left for a sleeper train to Barcelona. They will actually be in Rome during one of the days we’re there, so we might be able to meet them at the hostel we’ve got booked. That would be very cool!
Then Chuck and I looked at the information for the train we’d take the next morning to Bern, Switzerland. And what do you know, the train out of Paris needs a reservation, which we did not have. We hustled over to the metro and rode to the Gare De Lyon station. We talked to one of the people there and found that the earliest train we could get would be the 6:10pm train the next day. This also meant the furthest we’d be able to get that night would be Bern. So we booked the reservation and went back to Aloha Hostel to figure stuff out.
We sent an email off to our hostel in Grindelwald because we wouldn’t be able to make it there to stay the night like we had planned. We booked the Bern Youth Hostel instead. Luckily, it had availability and wasn’t too highly priced. We then headed to bed, and admittedly, I was rather frustrated and annoyed because we’d lost a day in Switzerland, which is the place I was looking forward to most. Losing a day was irritating, but I guess it wouldn’t be backpacking if something unexpected didn’t happen.