Lincoln et Rachel a Paris trois jours

Being Sunday, Parisians take things much more slowly than the remaining six days of the week -- and either the US or London -- Rachel and I decided to do the same, talking a very leisurely start to the morning eventually heading to the Musee Des Egouts De Paris (Museum of the Sewers of Paris) which was an interesting look under the streets of Paris and certainly aromatic -- though, as one may expect, not in a good way (it certainly reduced the cost of lunch afterwards...)--as a technical minded person the dirty history was quite interesting.

Since the photos below ground didn't really turn out (and let's be honest, do you really want to see someone else's raw excrement floating on a rapidly moving  without also having the experience of smelling it), here's a photo taken across the bridge from the entrance -- the Flame of Liberty with the Eiffel tower in the background -- according to Wikipedia it's a full-size replica of the flame in the hand of the Statute of  Liberty

We found lunch at a small cafe slightly off the tourist beaten path but with the Eiffel Tower lurking in the distance and setting out for our second underground experience of the day -- a fair distance away -- the Catacombs de Paris, an immense subterranean network of caves re-purposed centuries ago to hold intricately stacked bones from deconsecrated cemeteries taken over by the needs of the living in an expanding Paris of the time.

This attraction was the first time we encountered a major queue during our visit -- waiting about an hour above ground to get through the turnstile to get below ground. Though I have a weak stomach generally, I was really surprised that I wasn't really affected by seeing thousands of bones, skulls, and the like stacked so carefully on both sides of a passage that at times seemed like it would never end. It is interesting to consider that these bones have been lying in place here for in some cases over two hundred years.

 
After we left the home of the dead and returned above ground to the land of the living we walked some side streets before finding ourselves back at the RER/Metro station that delivered us to this neighborhood and decided that -- with a distinct chill and ominous clouds in the air -- that we would return to the hotel and find something to snack on along the way.

Lincoln