les Catacombs

Interestingly, our apartment is literally blocks away from one of my favorite Paris tourist destinations: the catacombs. The catacombs are an underground network of tunnels which house millions of human bones. Sometime around the turn of the century the city of Paris needed to empty its cemeteries and they did so, creating the catacombs. Apparently the remains of several guillotined folks have over the years been deposited anonymously in the catacombs as well.

Picture a dimly lit corridor, and on either side of you are densely-packed woodpiles, except instead of logs, the "woodpiles" are full of human femurs. Quite a grim spectacle. In some areas, the bones are arranged in designs, and there are several signs with either poetry related to Death and dying as well as signs commemorating the different cemeteries which were dug up. We visited the catacombs with my parents a few days ago and I now show you some of the pictures.

The place where we went is the authorized version of the catacombs. There also allegedly exist various portals of entry scattered across the city where those in-the-know can illegally explore the extensive network.

French word of the Day: the word for "sand paper" in French is "papier de verre", which literally translated means "paper of glass." The verb for "to sand" is "ponser".

Stay tuned for a special guest blog entry by my Dad sometime soon, during which he will describe our misadventure yesterday which involves a rack full of priceless antique banjos falling on top of his head. I kid you not, this actually happened, and I'll let Rick Hellman give you the details, probably tomorrow or the next day....