My Parisian Bucket List...

So... I'm officially leaving Paris at the end of September to start - something else.  Here are my answer to the most common FAQ's:

Frequently Asked Questions:

1) What do you want to do?

- I would like to go into Public Relations.  I'm looking into PR firms at the moment, and I'm hoping to start calling them in the next few weeks.

2) Where are you going to do this?

- Tallahassee, Florida.  :-D

Any other questions you may have, feel free to contact me.

Now that we've cleared that up, I feel like there are a lot of things that I still need and want to do while I'm here in Paris.  A "Bucket List" of sorts.  I feel like once I leave, it'll probably be quite a long time before I make it back to Paris - so I need to make the most of my time here, and see everything that I want to see in the next 3 months.  

  

So, just as a warning.  If you come to visit me in Paris anytime soon, don't expect me to go with you to the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, or anything else "typically Parisian."  I am going to take you on the "obscure sights of Paris" tour.  Leah was the first to fall victim to my new form of "showing my friends around."  Since she'd already been to Paris, I didn't feel too bad about this.  

Sight #1:  St. Denis Basilica - where most of the kings of France are buried

I just like this picture because you can see the reflection of the stained glass windows.

Feet.  Of Kings.  King's feet. 

Me and one of my favorite French characters - Catherine de Medici.  She is so cool - I love her.  Despite the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre thing.  It wasn't her fault.  She was just misunderstood.

" I have the heart of a little boy - in a jar on my desk." - Stephen King

I'm not sure if HE really has a heart of a little boy in a jar - but the Basilica of St. Denis does.  This the heart of Louis XVII - the 10 year old boy who died in the Temple prison during the French Revolution.  His heart was stolen during the autopsy to be passed around for many years while wild rumors of his uncertain escape from prison circulated during what would have been his lifetime (including a character in Huck Finn who claims to be Louis XVII).  In 2000, they finally did DNA testing on the heart and proved it to be the son of Marie Antoinette - the real Louis XVII who actually died in prison.

Sight #2: The Catacombs

So back in the day, cemeteries started to cause major health problems in major cities - especially here in Paris before and during the French Revolution when they were killing thousands of people in a matter of months and dumping their bodies rather unceremoniously into mass graves.  So to solve this problem, the French exhumed these graves and dumped the old bones into a big pit underneath the sewers of Paris, and in the early 1800's they made them all pretty so that tourists like myself could go and see them.

As you walk the 500 meters to the catacombs, you head down a long semi-dark hallway which gets progressively colder the deeper you go into the ground.  As some points, you have to walk single file by narrow side passages that are gated, padlocked, and inexplicably dark.  If this was a movie, the ghost of a pirate would jump out and make ghoulish noises at you - but this is real life... which makes it that much more creepy.

Finally, you reach the catacombs and this is the first thing you see.

I took the picture below of Leah - I think its one of my favorites.  Is it a ghost revisiting its body?  Or is it one of my dearest friends who was about to throw up at the sight of so many skulls?

Not only that, but the deeper you go, the colder it gets; and condensation begins to form on the walls and ceiling and, if you're not careful, drips onto your head and shoulders.  Ghost slime? Or unshed tears for the thousands of lives that were lost during the Great Terror?  

You can't really leave the catacombs without feeling like you've somehow glimpsed into the fabric of destiny.  The future becomes the present becomes the past.  Dust to dust.

Sight #3: the Kandinsky exhibit - not so obscure; but I probably wouldn't have gone without someone else - so I'm glad she let me drag her along.

So... looking back, I guess this was kinda a macabre day - I tried to get her to do the Sewer Tour with me, but she x'ed that one pretty fast.  Some other time.  Any volunteers?!