The Scroop's European Holiday: Paris

This morning we didn’t get moving until around 11 o’clock as we all had a bit of a sleep in and a lazy morning. After brekky we head down to the post office to see about sending some of the ~~crap~~ souvenirs we have acquired to date. Due to the odd dimensions of the box we need to fit everything into we are informed that we will be charged around €150 to mail it back to Australia. If we use one of the French Postal Services little shoe boxes it will be “much cheaper”. Looks like we will be carting this stuff around Europe for a little bit longer. On the way to the post office we spot a new patisserie over the road from our apartment that is selling the most amazing cakes so we stock up. We have some of these for lunch when we get back from the post office and leave a couple for dinner. After lunch we take the Metro from our stop, Rambuteau, which is about 50m away, down to where the Catacombes tour starts from in Montparnasse. The Paris Catacombes only allow 200 people in at a time so apparently it can get very busy. We have looked at trying to book tickets for the “skip the line” tours but it was booked out until October and Trip Advisor suggests the wait can be hours and then you might not get in before the last departure of 4pm. Our strategy was to get there after 2pm and that way we hope most people would have all ready done the lining up and we may sneak in before 4pm. We go fully prepared to wait for 2 hours and we take food and water for the kids and even let them take their iPods so they have something to do while in line. As it turned out the line was moving very quick and we only had to wait 30 minutes. Amazingly the admission price was only €8 each for adults and the kids were free. We enter down a tiny spiral stone staircase with 130 steps into a large underground tunnel system. These tunnels seem to go for ever and we cover 2km of these on our way trough. When we get about ¾ of the way through we hit the bones. It is an amazing sight to see walls and walls of bones, in some sections I reckon the bones were about 3m deep, and they just went on and on and on throughout the tunnels. This was a real treat to see this and we are so glad we decided to take the punt and get down there, one of the highlights of Paris. We wander through the tunnels for about an hour and a quarter before taking the spiral staircase back up to ground level. We catch the train back to the apartment picking up our regular dinner on the way. After dinner we walk down to Pont Neuf to do the river cruise along the Seine. When we went down yesterday to buy tickets we were told by the “lovely lady” at the ticket counter that there was “no need to buy a ticket, just come down 15 minutes before departure time”. So we get down there ½ an hour before departure time and there is a queue that was so long I thought we were gonna have to hail a cab to get to the end of it. And, there is one person on the ticket booth. To add salt to the wound there are people going straight in who have obviously bought tickets earlier. Great. We line up and by the time we get to the ticket booth the boat is just about full and the only seats left are the shitty ones and at €40 we decide to bail. That sort of ruined our night. We think of other things we can do but we are all pretty shagged from a few long days and we also have to pack our bags before we leave tomorrow. So we wander back to the apartment taking the scenic route around the Latin Quarter and behind the Notre Dame before getting home around 9pm. We love Paris and we are sad to leave but we are looking forward to arriving in Bruges. There are 2 things we do not like about Paris and they certainly will not be missed. 1) The cigarette smoke. Paris reeks of cigarette smoke and you cannot eat, drink, walk and do anything without someone making you enjoy their pleasure. 2) The Parisian people. I say Parisian because I am not sure this applies to all of France. This is said a lot but you have to experience it first hand to truly believe it. They are the most stuck up, arrogant, ignorant group of people I have come across. They do not move out of the way when they walk past you, not even a little twist of the shoulder to avoid a collision which happens often on the narrow, crowded footpaths around Paris. They look at you with absolute disdain, even the people who are in the business of tourism! Anyway, take those things out of Paris and this place would be beyond compare.