17. Xen Times

My brother came to town. Xen's my youngest brother, thirteen years my junior. Megan and I wanted to show him a good time in a town that we live in, but rarely go all tourist-ey in.

That's him there on the left, plus, like, 20 years.

And thus began a madcap tour of more museums and attractions than even Mike and Monica (Megan's parents) saw when they were here (that was over New Year's, and I'm getting to it). I found that even with my meager French, even though I've been here for a while, it's hard to get by without my compass rose, the star by which Petit Bateau sails, the soon-to-be Dr. Megan McMullan. It also made me wish I had a pedomoter.

First, the very first day Xen arrived, after we'd gotten back from the airport and Megan had said hi before she had to go to the library and do the thing we'd come here for her to do, we went to the Catacombs. Back in the day (19^th Century for you discerning readers. Here's a link that will save you looking up wikipedia yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Catacombs ), the Powers That Be realized that that having churchyards full of rotting, unembalmed corpses all over the place, seeping into the water table or getting dug up by enterprising young doctors, wasn't such a hot idea. Plus, they needed more room to build stuff.

So they dug up roughly a kajillion bones and stuck them in some tunnels. Where'd they get the tunnels, you ask? Well nearby was an underground quarry where they'd dug up a bunch of granite to build more of those piles of stone they call palaces and such. Named it the Catacombes de Paris and called it a day. Aaand now it's a tourist attraction.

Mostly, though, it's an excuse to make you walk. Walk and walk, and for a long time there's no bones. Just stone walls, and some bricks, and stone, and then hey there's a model that some miner/quarrier chipped out before he got caught in a cave-in and died, and then more stone, and then finally bones!

That femur has moss on it. Or gangrene. I'm not sure.

So, so many bones. You know that scene in Return of the King when Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas go through the Paths of the Dead? Remember that part (it may be in the extended version) where all those skulls pour down on them? Like that, but with less pouring down on you and more femurs and pelvises.

So, what I'm talking about is at 2:50, although at 1:30 it's fun 

to watch Gimli trying not to walk on skulls.

All stacked up, sometimes in patterns to break the monotony of room after room of millions of human bones stacked like sardines to shoulder height. Right there. Where you can touch them. You're not supposed to touch them (and anyway, eew), but still there are places where you can see there used to be a skull but now it's...gone. Hopefully someone stole it.

No flash photography is allowed, which is something that we ran into a lot at museums and stuff. I guess they think the bright lights would be bad for the artifacts, and they're probably right: hour after hour and day after day of flashes, flashes, flashes might wind up like just leaving the things out in the sun. Anyway, my camera's low light business is for crap, so it's hard to see any of the pictures I took, but I did cheat on one of them (don't tell):

Like, seriously. This, everywhere, all the time,
 for a long, long walk. So, so many bones.

At the end, you go up a really long spiral staircase, go through a door, and bam you're back on the streets of Paris. No gift shop (though there's a store cross the street that'll sell you memorabilia if you want), no “Hope to see you again!” sign. Also, you're somewhere completely different from where you started, no signs to tell you where you are or how to get back to where you were; you're not even on a large street. Xen and I managed it, though it involved me asking someone directions.

Me: Ah, pardon, madame. Ou est le boulevard Montparnasse? (That's a big street near our place)

She: (this is what I understood): Ooh la la (swear to god she said that) it's a long way. Flerble vezzhy to the right, bish flib wobble pop left, then, blar blar diddlebump.

Me: ...D'accord. Merci, madame. Bon soire.

(lady walks away)

Xen: You didn't understand any of that, did you?

Me: Well...no. But she pointed that way. Let's go.

By now the second wind from lack of sleep+excitement had died away and jet lag was playing merry hob with Xen's synapses and he was looking tired. We made our weary back to his hotel and thus ended our first day in Paris.

The next day Xen and I would be on our own for the afternoon; Megan had some deadlines to meet which didn't care that Xen was in town, so she had to put in some time at the BNF reading, researching, and 'riting. Megan would meet us later for dinner. But before she did that we wandered the streets for a bit. Xen wanted to see the Louvre (but didn't want to go in; just the glass pyramid things). So away we went.

Foreground: Megan. Midground: Xen taking picture of
Louvre pyramid thing. Background: Louvre pyramid thing.

Xen: Why are you taking a picture of me taking a picture?
Me: I'm being all meta and stuff.

Precious, I tell you. Precious.

After those pictures were duly taken, Megan pointed out the big Ferris wheel nearby.

It is sort of hard to miss.

 She's mentioned several times that she'd like to go up in it. Me, I don't like the heights so much, but Xen was amenable, and who was I to be the party pooper? We rode that baby up, and yes, it was cool. Except for a couple hills, Paris is a pretty flat place. I mean, if you want to spend a bunch of money you can ride an elevator to the top of Tours Montparnasse or Eiffel (both of which will let you climb the stairs for a smaller fee), but aside from that there's precious few chances to see Paris from above. The Ferris wheel is one of them.

So there's the Statue of Liberty...

That's the biggest hill in Paris, upon which sits the
 Basilica du Sacre-Couer, the Basilica of the Sacred heart.

Louvre foreground, Notre Dame there in the back a bit.

And then Megan had to leave us and go work. We took that opportunity to go to Notre Dame. We'd gone to see it when Megan's parents came through, so she didn't mind missing it, and it was free so I didn't mind seeing it again.

It's a big church (excuse me, cathedral). It's huge, and has lots of massive pillars and vaulted ceilings and gorgeous stained-glass windows. It's also full of people milling around taking pictures (which in all fairness, was exactly what Xen and I were doing), which detracted from the overall religious solemnity. I also feel like all the more transitory wooden stuff, pews and pulpits and screens and all that, could have gone. Okay, I guess I would like to stand in Notre Dame, devoid of people and everything that wasn't made of stone, and marvel at that sheer hugeness of the thing, built with only people and ropes and pulleys and stuff. Architects doing math with sheepskin and charcoal. Does that make me a bad person? It might.

Here's Xen taking a picture of it. 

When Mike and Monica came (Megan's parents, and yes I am going to blog about that) we spent about an hour in there, looking at each of the small chapels that open off the main sanctuary, reading descriptions of things. Xen and I were in and out in fifteen minutes. I had taken a bunch of pictures before, and Xen apparently didn't feel like he needed to take many. This left us with much more time on our hands than I had figured. We stood for a while in a little park behind the cathedral, considering our options

Mercifully, time came for dinner, and we crossed the Seine into the Latin Quarter, met Megan, and had some excellent Greek food at this place called Le Minotaure. Charred flesh on skewers! Guy playing a balalaika! Wine! Moments sympa.

The next day, Friday, all three of us went to the Musee D'Orsay, an old train station that has since been turned into one of the world's premier art museums. It is full of paintings and sculptures. It also does not allow you to take pictures of any of them. And they have monitors all over the place, so I couldn't sneak any, like I did in the Catacombs or that time at the Star Trek exhibit where I was not going to leave the mock-up of the transporter room until I'd gotten a picture of myself on the pad...but that's neither here nor there. So, no pictures.

Totally worth it.

Besides, I spent most of my time trying to find everyone. At some point, I wandered one way, Xen wandered another, and Megan went a third. At first I thought it was cool, we'd just catch up at the end. But then I realized this place is huge. And labyrinthine. It's definitely got what in video game terms you'd called replayability. You could go there many times and not see everything, both because it's so big and because the displays twine around themselves, whole rooms hidden behind what just looks like the space behind a large painting. It's cool.

I could text Megan and figure out where she was, but had no way to get in touch with Xen. I even thought about doing a loudspeaker shout-out but thought that the likelihood of Xen being able to tell what it was saying was small; and I shuddered to ask the museum people to do it at all, much less ask them to do it in English or (gasp!) let me do it.

Suffice to say that we all made it out of there. A day of museum-walking is tiring, but luckily one our friends had invited us over to her place for dinner. She has an apartment with rooms and stuff and a couch for lounging on. Plus she had just bought a really deep, comfy rug.

In the interest of saving you a too-long read, something I fear I have a penchant for creating, I'm breaking Xen's visit up into two posts. But I'm not going to wait a week for part two; it should be up in the next day or so. I've missed several in the past couple weeks and need to make up for lost time. Stay tuned!