Underground Ugly Paris

We found ourselves with a free day so I googled Paris museums and asked Sophie what she'd like to do. She might seem sweet on the exterior, my kid, but inside she is obviously creepy and morbid since she chose either the Vampire Museum or the Catacombs.

Turns out the Vampire Museum requires you to make an appointment in advance-- you cannot just show up-- and more often than not you end up with a private tour by the serious vampire enthusiast who runs the place, which includes all sorts of weird artifacts, including a mummified cat.

So.... the catacombs it is!  It's an underground museum of bones that were all put together after a whole bunch of old cemeteries in Paris were overcrowded due to black plague and revolutions and whatnot.

We arrive at 10:30am to a long line.  But we are good at this-- we did Versailles yesterday and that lineup took an hour and a half.  At Disneyland Paris last weekend we accidentally waited a whole hour for the stupid Dumbo ride.  Today we have planned, so we have snacks and are in shade.  We are pros.

The thing is though..... this line is reallllllllly slow.  Two hours in and we are in the hot sun and having stupid conversations like this:

Soph:  What we need here, I think, is a person who's really cold and who doesn't mind waiting in lineups.  Then we could just go to a cafe nearby and they could wait for us.

Me:  Who is that exactly?  Frosty the Snowman?

Soph: Why him?

Me: Well, he likes cold.  Plus he can't walk to a cafe because he has no legs.  He just stands there.  He'd be good at this.

Soph: Mum, he'd melt.

Me: Okay, technically, yes, but then the people behind us could just, like, kick the carrot nose along to hold our place in line.

Soph: Mum, Frosty doesn't have a carrot nose.

Me: He doesn't?  Yes he does, he's a frickin snowman.

Soph: The song, mum: "with a corncob pipe, and a button nose".   No one is going to kick a button.   A button is not going to hold our place in line.

Damn. She has a point.

So we take turns waiting.  One will go try to find a shady spot in a square nearby to sit while the other is the carrot.  The carrot who is roasting in the hot sun, not moving, waiting to see dead bodies.  The German couple behind us give up and leave.

While I wait I listen to the Seattle couple behind us bicker about who is taking time off when Wade comes to visit net week.  They really drag it out.  I want to contact Wade and tell him don't bother.  I feel so bad for Wade.

I also notice the petite French girl in front of me in the line who is gorgeous and so French looking in her summer skirt has the thickest hair on her legs I've ever seen-- thicker than Seattle guy in his shorts.  Immediately I wonder if she doesn't shave her pits, and as though she can read my mind, she shifts her weight and puts a hand on her hip, and I can see with her tank top on that there's no hair there.  Why does she shave there and not her legs?  Can I ask her? We've never spoken but I feel that I know her since we've spent so much time together.

A woman rides by on a bicycle and stops at a traffic light.  She's also so Parisien- no helmet, wearing cute little sandals and a lovely patterned chic sleeveless shift.... and a Hannibal Lector mask on her face.  Just.  Why.

I see a very large, beer bellied man, wearing a Mickey Mouse Backpack and holding a pink flowered umbrella guarding him against the hot sun.

Another hour goes by.   Sophie says "Catacombs?! Cata-come on, is more like it."  I say "I think the bones in there are just the bones of the people who died waiting so long in the lineup."  We agree that the private tour with the creepy dude at the Vampire museum is looking so sweet right now.

At least they give us gorgeous foliage to look at in the lineup, like this:

It must be the only ugly area of Paris.

In the fourth hour the German couple who gave up two hours ago walks by and points to us and laughs outrageously in German.  It's the only time I've never heard someone speaking German not sound mad.  They are genuinely giddy about our misfortune.

Finally after four and a half hours we get in and walk down about 200 stairs and a few kilometres of low ceilinged narrow stone hallways and run into some information boards and then.... rooms and rooms and rooms that look like this:

They only show skulls and femurs, and tell us to imagine that there's so much more than we can actually see from our vantage point.  There are six million dead people in there.  We feel so bad for making stupid jokes in the lineup.  These are real people.

We learn that in 1898 a hundred people set up a private party in the catacombs and listened to Beethoven down there.  And in 2004 police discovered a full movie theatre setup in a cavern down there, with screen, projector, bar, tables, and chairs.  People are so weird.

Exiting through the gift shop made us instantly feel better about ourselves too though, once we saw  all the silly skull shaped joke products like this:

Full disclosure: My first thought when I saw this last one was "Mmmmm, BACON."  So perhaps I'm not so very sensitive after all.