Paris: The 17th
We awoke, after a night on the hill of martyrs, to the goings-on of the Paris Marathon right below our windows. It was a gloriously sunny day in Paris with fit bodies pounding their way down the rue. The only sensible thing to do, then, was to bury ourselves underground with the Parisian dead.
When we opened our patio doors in the morning, we could hear a sweet little kid urging his mother on with “Allez maman!”
After breakfast, we headed back to Rive Gauche to explore the amazing, and amazingly creepy, Paris catacombs. Due to overcrowding and poor sanitation centuries ago, the rotting bodies of Parisians needed to be removed from cemeteries and relocated to a safe place. The quarries beneath the city that had been mined to build Paris were converted into an amazing necropolis. It’s the world’s most placid and beautiful exhibit on death that I’ve ever seen. It was art made of mortal remains and was, oddly, peaceful and calming.
After our exploration, we wandered up the quiet streets of Rocherau-Tanguy and listened to a beautifully-voiced busker to some wonderful tunes. It was a fabulously lazy day with a slight overcast and chill so we headed up the Rue Daguerre (named for an early innovator in photography) to Café Daguerre where we had (yet another) long, lazy, French bistro lunch. Afterward, we lazily walked up the Rue Daguerre and found the most remarkable store ever: a harmonica, accordion, and wine shop. Where has that been all my life?
From that area, we took the train into the city hall area near the Pompidou Art Center. By chance, they were holding an exhibition on a designer that I have a keen interest in, Ettore Sottsass. My favorite invention of his is the Valentine typewriter, but it was interesting to see his other work in (ceramics particularly).
Afterward we were so, frankly, exhausted of fancy bistro food that when we stumbled across a shawarma shop run by some Syrian immigrants, we stopped. I was glad to throw them a few euros for what turned out to be some amazingly good shawarma! We headed back to the hotel for an early night as the next two days were going to be our heavy museum days at the Orangerie, the Louvre, and the Musée d’Orsay.
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