World Travel Guide Online

Rainy Days in Paris
Paris, France

One of the few advantages of touring Paris in wet, cold, mucky October, aside from the fractional increase in personal space, is that there are several indoor attractions that will keep you warm and dry while you are being deluged by more culture and history than you can shake a fresh baguette at. My first rainy-day escape in Paris was the world-famous Louvre Gallery.

Louvre

I knew from prior experience that tackling the Louvre was going to require a big time commitment and huge energy exertion. The Louvre is gigantic. The crowds, even in October, are fantastically bad. As I waited in line for over 45 minutes just to buy a ticket – remember, this is October not August when it is likely five times worse – an announcement came over the loud speaker in four languages telling us that for our safety, we all had to leave the building immediately while security dealt with an unspecified situation. The few hundred of us that were in line at the time had all invested a lot of time in that line and not a single one of us flinched. Even the dad with his three small children stood his ground. Since the ticket window was still selling tickets and security wasn’t making any effort to herd us out the door, I gambled that it was safe to sit tight and not forfeit my precious spot in line. In fact, when there was no follow-up to the security announcement, I started to suspect that it was all just a sneaky ploy by the Louvre personnel to trick loitering people into leaving in order to free up more space.

If you want to thoroughly conquer the entire Louvre, I’d estimate that you’d need a minimum of three days and Mother Theresa-like patience and determination, fueled by a generous supply of Red Bull. The place is filled to the rafters and beyond with an immeasurable number of ancient, important, historical pieces of art. Each and every piece in each and every room is priceless and especially after dropping 8,50 euros to get in, you tend to start out with the intention of seeing as much as possible to get your money’s worth.

Like my visit 10 years earlier, I started out slow. I walked leisurely from room to room, stopping to admire and read about every single item. I went through the Medieval Louvre (the Roman-era structure and moat that was discovered beneath the Louvre building that has been excavated and preserved), then Mesopotamia and part way through 18^th – 19^th Century French Sculptures. This took me over an hour and upon consulting the exhibit map I determined that I had only covered one little section, of one level, of one wing of the Louvre. I kicked it up a notch by only stopping to read about a few prominent pieces in each room. Using this approach I managed to clamor through 5^th – 18^th century French Sculptures, Antique Iran, Pharaonic Egypt, Pre-Classical Greece, Greek Antiquities and Roman Antiquities. This took another hour and a half at which point I estimated that I had covered 9 percent of the Louvre. Counting the time I spent in line to buy a ticket, I had been in the Louvre for nearly four hours. I was getting hungry, tired, sleepy and very sick of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. So, I shifted into over-drive where I just blasted through every room without slowing down and only stopped for the Louvre highlights.

Is she winking at me?

In this manner I hurtled through Arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, Napoleon III Apartments, Michelangelo’s “The Dying Slave,” Canova’s “Psyche and Cupid,” and the grand daddy of ‘em all, Leonardo di Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” This took another hour and by the time I had finished, I figured that I had covered just over 25% of the Louvre. This is where I threw in the towel. Despite being of unequalled coolness and a once in a lifetime opportunity (actually, twice in a lifetime, in my case) to see such tremendous artifacts, I simply didn’t have the energy or interest to roam for another four to six hours, which in all likelihood would have only gotten me through about 50% of the joint. I trudged out the exit, picked up a spinach quiche and took a nap.

I was awakened in the early evening and informed that I was going to see the late show at the Moulin Rouge that night with a group of people from the hostel. The Rouge, which was conveniently located only about three blocks away, has been featuring mostly naked cabaret shows three times a night since 1889, but the resurgence since the film was released with that dreamy Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, has made the show more popular than ever. We got in line for the 11:30 PM show at 10:30 PM. Paris was getting colder by the day and I briefly debated the wisdom of standing outside, at night, freezing to death, in line for an hour just to see synchronized, jiggling boobies. To our surprise, the theatre staff herded everyone indoors where instead of freezing we roasted in the collective body heat that 400 people in a small lobby could generate while we waited for the doors to open.

Not having reservations and dressed the way backpackers tend to dress probably contributed to us being placed in the last row of the theatre. We were nevertheless treated with great care. The tickets were 63 euros (US $74.12), so even us dregs in the back row were paying enough to be doted on. We were cordially served Champagne as the lights went down. They launched the show with several back-to-back dance routines featuring anywhere from one to 20 sets of naked ta-tas. The dancing was sub-par and several of the men seemed to have amusing rhythm deficiencies. I’ve seen tighter chorus line choreography at free, off-the-Strip shows in Las Vegas. Some of the costumes were very cool, though the select few costumes that consisted of more than a G-string and a head-dress the sized of a satellite seemed to have been designed in the 1980s and had not been updated. There were a lot of sequins, lycra, and the tailoring of all the clothing was laughably out of style. I, of course, would have never noticed this on my own. I only learned these facts through the three women that were with me who critiqued everything from waistline cuts (too high) to who was icing and rouging their nipples.

Even in the face of all that cleavage – albeit from 50 yards away, they should really consider distributing binoculars – after the third ho-hum dance act, I was starting to get a little perturbed at the thought of watching 90 minutes of this type of entertainment for the exceptional price I had paid, but deliverance came when the first of several solo acts came out. The interlude performers were, in order of appearance; a gut-wrenching, high-up balancing artist, a percussionist/juggler and a very schlock ventriloquist who demonstrated fluency in at least eight languages while working the crowd. I was fairly impressed with the juggler, but there was no question that the final solo act got the biggest reaction from all of us. It was a one-woman swimming ballet. The woman came out and stood on the edge of a transparent pool that rose out of the stage. She was wearing a G-string, eyeliner that seemed overdone, even from the back row, and nothing else. As the pool finished rising, we suddenly became aware of the two anacondas that were swimming around and looking agitated. The woman jumped in and proceeded to swim, dive and spin around while draping the snakes all over herself. Initially we all freaked out and spilled Champagne on ourselves, but after a few minutes it became clear that she was in no danger. In fact, whenever one of the anacondas could wriggle away from the woman’s grasp it would make a break for the edge of the pool and try to slither out to safety. The rim of the pool had an overhang that prevented their escape and the woman would eventually grab them and yank them back into the action. Poor things.

The show climaxed to the best of its abilities and we were ushered out of the theatre, past the gift shop where programs were being sold for 12 euros and t-shirts for 40 euros. The gift shop didn’t do much business.

The following day I dropped myself into the other end of the emotional spectrum when I got several lifetimes worth of the creeps shaken out of me in the Paris Catacombs. Back in 1785, when the Plague was in full swing, the Parisians decided that they needed to free up some room for all of the people dropping dead by exhuming the remains from six million graves in the overflowing cemeteries and piling them up neatly in the tunnels of disused quarries beneath the city. Now, it’s a spine-chilling tourist sight.

After paying five euros I descended about four stories into the Earth down a spiral staircase, which opened up at the bottom into the weakly lit, eerie catacombs. The first four hundred yards of the catacombs were just plain, dark, cement corridors. I remember thinking that they didn’t look much different from the corridors at my old job, except that a typical stroll down those hallways made me feel a heck of a lot more dread than the Paris Catacombs. After a disappointing amount of time seeing nothing but bare, cement corridors, I was beginning to assume that all those bones were walled up behind the cement. So the remains of six million people were behind those walls. Big frickin’ whoop. I just paid five euros to imagine what that looked like, something I could have done for free in a café while snacking on pastry and a cappuccino. I was going to have a bone to pick with whoever was manning the exit. But the shocker was waiting for me at about the halfway point.

Paris Catacombs

I went through a doorway and suddenly the walls were no longer bare cement blocks. I was surrounded by floor-to-ceiling, tightly packed, piles of bones. The bones were arranged neatly into surprisingly creative patterns along the walls. The guys making the piles were obviously desperate for distractions of any kind. It was unnerving. I pulled myself together, took a few pictures and kept moving. I walked for a very long time. The bones were never-ending. While walking, I passed several gated catacomb arteries leading off in different directions from the main corridor and I could clearly see through the gates that these routes were also completely filled with bones, extending off into the indefinite distance. I hadn’t given it much thought before that moment, but six million skeletons can fill up a heck of a lot of catacombs. After seeing a dozen gated off, branching corridors teeming with yet more bones my case of the willies peaked. Clearly I was only seeing one, small part of the bone-filled passageways. Every time I tried to back up a little to get a photo of a certain bone pile, I would back right into another stack of bones. The claustrophobic volume of bones I was seeing was astounding. Signs are posted forbidding flash photography in the Catacombs, but the place was very dark and my hand was nowhere near steady enough for non-flash, long exposure shots so I was naughty a few times and flipped on the flash. The tour path went on for what seemed like six or seven city blocks. The distance I was covering was made evident as every hundred yards or so there was a plaque stating what street was directly overhead. After stumbling through what seemed like an eternity of disturbing, dimly lit, bone corridors I emerged into a well lit room with yet another four-story spiral staircase leading back up to street level.

Once on the street, I blinked and shrunk from the light, despite the thick cloud cover. I felt like I had been underground for months, but it had only been about 30 minutes. I staggered around in circles to get my bearings and find a metro entrance while I shook off the lingering shivers of what I had seen. What on Earth made me want to see that horrendous place in the first place? Oh yeah, several hostel companions. Swift payback of some sort was definitely in order. Meanwhile, there was little question in my mind that the experience would end up being juicy nightmare material some time in the near future.

That night, after meticulously short-sheeting select hostel-mates, I headed out to partake in Paris’ number one rain-day activity, drinking to forget in a toasty warm bar.