Our brief trip to Paris did not begin well, with a transport strike on 7th September. The air traffic controllers were out, so many flights into France, or over French airspace, were cancelled or delayed. We were the lucky ones, I guess - our flight was delayed by four hours but at least we made it into France. The strike involved trains as well, which meant that we had to alight at Gare du Nord (North Station) and figure out what to do next. We were pleasantly surprised by the very helpful, and very fluent, English-speaking Information staff. We were quickly told how to change to the Metro, which line, which platform and so on. Very efficient.
All these delays meant that we didn't actually make it to our hotel until 10:30pm. Now in an ordinary hotel this wouldn't be a problem, except that Elwyn and I had booked into a hospital. No, not a mistake in translation. The Hospitel Hotel Dieu is the 6th floor of a public hospital smack-bang in the geographic centre of Paris. It is right next door to the Notre Dame Cathedral, on a little island in the middle of the Seine.
The photo shows the view from our window. The rooms are rented to tourists to help fund the hospital. When you are inside your room it looks just like any small European hotel, but to get to your room you have to walk through the opthalmic surgery area, past the empty gurneys and portable xray machines. Very bizarre but in some odd way, really cool.
Well anyway we arrived after the hotel reception was closed, so not knowing what to do, we went to the Emergency department, which seemed to be the only thing open. So there we are, standing in Accident & Emergency, with our enormous suitcases, surrounding by some very sorry-looking people with various injuries and mailaises. In my very best schoolgirl French I announced to the receptionist that I was Australian (so they didn't think I was British and chuck me out), that I couldn't speak French and did he speak English. 'No', he said (in French), 'but I understand your French very well'. I then proceeded to stumble through a pantomime of waving my reservation notice about, pointing to all the important words and babbling every French word I could remember (I think I ordered two cafe au laits and a sticky bun for my elephant, but I'm not sure). After a few minutes of this charade the receptionist just smiled and said in immaculate English, 'You can reach the entrance to the hotel by going to the large doors in the next street. Press the button next to the blue double doors'. Ah, he was just playing with me!
After eventually finding our way to our room, we realised that our first day in Paris was about to end, and we hadn't seen anything. But Paris being Paris, we went out at 11pm, found crowds of people swarming around the Notre Dame Cathedral and rapidly found a brasserie with great food and cheerful waiters. We were starting to have fun in Paris. The photo on the left shows the garden in the centre of the hospital.
The next day, we started by visiting the cathedral. Large and dark - it is easy to imagine a hunchback bellringer scampering about its recesses. The Treasury was interesting, where they displayed the wealth of the church, as well as the usual relics of dead saints and visiting Popes.
After lunch, we went to the Catacombs (we were advised to eat first, in case we didn't feel like eating afterwards!). This is the place where the bones of 6 million Parisiens are stored and, quite frankly, arranged into some peculiar geometric shapes. Flash photography was not permitted, so we only have a few shots that worked out, but they give you sense of what it was like.
There was about 1.5km of tunnels, which had formally been quarries, in which the bones of people were placed between about 1790 and 1850. They had been moved from their original graves in central Paris due to outbreaks of disease from the rotting corpses in the overcrowded cemeteries. All this is good, but as a biological anthropologist I have one question: where are all the skulls? For that matter, where are all the other bones? You'll see in the pictures above that almost all of the bones are femurs and tibias (leg bones) with the occasional skulls thrown in for decoration. There were no visible arm bones, vertebrae, ribs or anything else to be seen and unless ancient Parisiens had 40 pairs of legs for every head, there was a dearth of skulls too. If anyone knows the answer to this mystery, please let me know. I tried to ask the attendant at the Catacombs, who spoke no English, but I think I ordered Crepes Suzette instead- well done, to be served on the patio - he certainly gave me an odd look.
Day Three in Paris did not involve dark churches or tunnels full of dead people, but light, airy galleries and lots of shopping.Oh, except for all the human blood on the floor, but I'll come to that in a moment. We started the day at the Louvre. As you know from earlier posts to this blog, I plan to see every Vermeer before I die. The Louvre had two of them. The photo on the left is of the apartments of Napolean III and the one on the right is of one of the Vermeers - The Lacemaker. There was also The Astronomer, but again, since flash photograhy was forbidden, the photos disn't quite work out. 
We also saw the Mona Lisa, well we saw the backs of people's heads who saw the Mona Lisa, which I guess is the same thing. It was very crowded. There was a fabulous collection of statues of various eras and Elwyn really enjoyed looking at 3,000 year old jewellry. We then dined in the Louvre restaurant, before heading off to do the other thing that Paris is famous for: clothes shopping.
This is Elwyn in her Parisien outfit - even the French turned their heads as she walked by. She certainly made an impression, but I don't think that I'll be letting her out after dark.
So after a hectic day of art galleries, shopping and eating, we decided that we would see a movie. We walked to the cinema and were studying the electronic boards above the ticket windows, displaying information on each movie, times, classifications, and so on. Since we were looking up and concentrating on what was above our heads, we completely failed to notice the pools of blood at our feet. Finally, something caught my eye (it was probably the ambulance officer kneeling on the floor trying to help the chap whose blood was all over the place) and we realised that we had stumbled into a medical emergency. As there was nothing we could do (there were already enough people who had the jobs of staring, pointing and whispering darkly to each other), we thought that it was best if we just tiptoed through the blood and left. There's never a dull moment in Paris.
No comments:
Post a Comment