La Vie en France: Bones and Folk Music.

What do the two have in common? That pretty much sums up my early weekend. I went to Paris to visit Thibs since he had two days off on weds/thurs. It ended up being a really great couple of days. First we had lunch at our favorite place, L'As du Falafel in the Marais, which is great food and cheap prices, and then walked around the Marais for a little while. That night we were invited to a concert by my friend Kaitlin. She told me it was indie rock/folk music and it seemed like it could be interesting. We ended up seeing a really great show, the band is called The Head and the Heart from Seattle, and they put on an awesome show. The band was great and we had a really good time with Katilin and her friend.

We realized last week that this happens to be the one year anniversary of our catacomb adventure of last year. For those of you who never heard about it, Thibaut and I spent an entire night underground in the catacombs of Paris, for an unofficial and completely illegal tour of the "world underground." It's impossible to explain in writing, so if you haven't heard about it, ask me this summer! Here are a few photos to bring back the memories:

army crawling through one of the tunnels

emerging from a manhole at 7am

We decided it was necessary to finally do the "official" catacomb tour to celebrate this important anniversary. This tour is 100% legal and probably about 20000000 times safer. So we met back up with Kaitlin, and waited in the half hour line to go back underground. The catacombs were built or carved out by the Romans thousands of years ago. The quarry didn't have much of a purpose until the 17th century, when Paris had a big problem. At this time it was very important to be buried next to a church after you died. The cemeteries started to get really overcrowded, but the priests kept accepting more and more people in their church's cemeteries, because the families were paying big money to put them there. Eventually the cemeteries became so overcrowded that the smell was unbearable, and many people were getting sick with the plague from the unsanitary conditions. This was when they decided to excavate the cemeteries and move the bodies underground, into what we now call the "catacombs." They turned a small part of the quarry tunnels into an underground ossuary. There are over 6 million people now buried in the catacombs, they were slowly excavated over many years (imagine having the job of "body mover" omg). You'll see in the pictures that they marked the date, as well as the cemetery that the bones were moved from. I was expecting just a few rooms, but this kept going, going, going, going forever! It felt like it was never going to end. It was interesting to see that no matter who you are, what color, what gender, what age, we all look the same in the end! It was a little depressing but I'm glad that we went to see it.

At the end of the tour, we had our bags checked. After observing the stack of bones and skulls next to the man checking, I realized that some sick people actually STEAL the bones! Who on Earth would want to steal someone's bones? There was a pretty big pile, and the guy told me that those were just from the past few days. Sick.

Afterwards we went for a long walk around Paris, I needed to be outside for a little while!