Rapid-fire posts for once, but there is a reason! With our Camino hike just about to start I wanted to make sure we were completely up to date – expecting a lot of long days of walking and limited blog writing time. So, what did we get up to during a week in Paris?
Walking
Paris is a city to be walked (and cycled – they are trying to make the city more cycle friendly, and as a result cyclists are everywhere which was great to see). So walk we did, racking up 15+ kilometres almost every day. We saw the sights, sounds and smells, taking in the Olympic preparations (scaffolding everywhere), beautiful architecture, cute shops and manicured parklands. We were blessed with largely great weather, which made it feel like we had finally emerged out of winter (Scotland) and into spring.
Eating and Drinking
Virtually every morning started with a visit to the Boulangerie, and a pile of pastries as a result. We hit up the Rotisserie during our stay as well, enjoying chicken and potatoes, and one night even met up with our French-Canadian friends (big group of engineering students on exchange from Quebec for a year) who we first met way back in Prague, for a night of drinking cocktails and catching up. As you’d expect, the bread and pastries were fantastic, and one of the few things that were quite affordable in what is otherwise an expensive city.
Gardens
We spent countless hours sitting and wandering the gardens, particularly the Luxenburg Gardens. In pleasant weather (which thankfully Paris put on a lot of for us) they are teeming with people enjoying the sun and the company of others. The chess tables were nearly always full, and the Bocce area was also. I became a bit of a Bocce fan – there are some pretty amazing amateur players out there, some of which were there both times we visited – which shows their dedication to the sport!
The Catacombs
When catching up with our French-Canadian friends, one of casually mentioned that they knew someone who went down the catacombs regularly. I was instantly switched on – this was my chance! A bit of context – I’ve always been fascinated with the catacombs, which are a web of passages below the streets of Paris. Built hundreds of years ago, through former quarries which are much older and from which much of Paris is built, these passages stretch for kilometres and are a complicated spiders web, which are technically illegal to enter. There is a small area that has been made accessible to the public, but it has been very much made safe and boring, and costs money to enter, often with a massive line. In 2018 during my last visit to Paris, some mates and I managed to find one of the many entrances to the catacombs (these entry points are largely kept secret so they don’t get shut off) but without a map and a guide, we had only gone about 100 metres in before freaking out and leaving the way we came.
So, I badgered Felix (French-Canadian friend) and he put me in touch with a friend of a friend who had a lot of experience down the catacombs and was headed down there the following day. Thus, I found myself on a street corner on a Sunday morning, waiting for some people I had never met (Charlotte opted for the Louvre instead). There were five of us including our guide Jules-Felix, and I was the only native English speaker. We shook hands, had a brief chat, then headed to a random man hole on the road, flipped it open, and quickly headed down a stone staircase and into another world. The catacombs are largely marked with the names of the streets above, which means if you have a map and some experience down there, they are actually fairly easily navigated… with only the occasional wrong turn. Though when your fellow explorers are all conversing rapidly in French at many of the turns, it can leave you wondering if they know where we are at all… We spent around 8 hours down there in total, travelling some 10 kilometres underground. We found all sorts of street artwork (some in Ancient Egyptian style, others cartoon characters, and everything else you could imagine), a former Nazi bunker, and an area known as the “Swimming Pool” where we had to wade through waist-deep water. There was plenty of scrambling through small holes to get to different areas, hunching over through long areas of short passages, and wading through water of varying depths. We also found ourselves in the basement of the Pharmacy department of a local university, surrounded by machinery at one point, which was only a tiny bit scary and very, very cool. We ran into around six other groups down there, which ranged from hardcore people who had set up camp for the weekend, to casual groups like ours, and even one girl walking around solo, cigarette in mouth.
Our guide didn’t know exactly where the exit was in the area we ended up, and so was taking a punt that we could find it – else it was another two hours walk underground to get to the next one he knew of. We ended up in a power/telephone (?) corridor, surrounded by cables, and we tried some 5 manholes that were locked, before finding one that was open. And so we emerged back into the world, covered in dust and soaked in water, much to the bemusement of an old couple and a family that were walking past. We quickly made our way away from the scene of our exit, and found a fountain where we washed our pants and shoes, which got us many more amused looks. It felt like we were members of some secret society – a completely surreal experience.
Overall, definitely one of my highlights of the whole trip so far.
The Eiffel Tower
On our last night, we caught up with the French-Canadian gang one last time and headed up the Eiffel tour. We were lucky enough to get a beautiful sunset, which really helped set the mood, then raced (literally) our way down the tour to get a good spot just in time to watch the nightly tower light show. A special way to end our stay with great people.
So, a relatively quick post in the end, but it was definitely a great week in Paris – there’s always so much going on in this city. Another place that goes on the list of “wish we had more time here” but that will have to be another adventure. The Camino awaits! I’m planning to journal as we go, and put a post out when we finish in about a month’s time. See you then.
Next Stops: Camino Frances