Day 2: Bonne Annee!

So after sleeping in, I got myself up and downstairs to meet up with the rest of the group to do a little grocery shopping at the market down the street. Cereal, milk, strawberry jam, croissants, coffee, and a few bottles of wine for the party later tonight.

After a brief lunch back at the apartment and putting the groceries away, Kirsten and I joined the rest of the group down at the entrance to the catacombs. If not for the long line snaking around the park you might miss it as it's just a shed with a small sign out in front. However, the line was long and ended up being a pretty lengthy wait.

The catacombs of Paris were filled back in the 1780s when the Cemetery of the Innocents (which was located essentially where we are staying now) began disgorging it's bodies into the local water supply and into people's basements and began causing some serious disease problems in the area. The catacombs themselves already existed as limestone quarries and were beginning to show some evidence of subsidence. The brilliant idea was struck to move the bodies into the quarries to help stabilize them and to rid the city of disease. After the city had moved the Cemetery of the Innocents they then proceeded to empty dozens of other cemeteries until the 1860s.

The workers did not maintain whole skeletons but rather constructed sturdy bulkheads throughout a portion of the quarry using only femurs and skulls. Presumably the rest of the bones were used as filler for these bulkheads because we didn't see anything but femurs and skulls.

The actual catacombs are pretty far from the entrance as we had to descend quite a ways underground and then walked for about fifteen minutes through the quarry (or mine) before we reached the catacomb area (or ossuary). All in all it was a very cool experience and I'm glad we did it.

After that we returned back to our apartments to change for the party and get a little food. Kirsten and I stopped at a little bakery and picked up a couple of croque monsieurs which we heated up in our oven. They were excellent although we couldn't exactly place what the cheese was that they used. The New Years Eve party was at Shelley, Tony, and Susie's apartment which was the biggest out of ours with a nice kitchen, dining room, and living room. At about quarter to midnight we walked down to the Seine and stood on Pont Neuf to ring in the new year with thousands of other revelers. We drank champagne straight from the bottles we passed around and watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle and fireworks go shooting off across the river. It was a great end to a pretty great year.

We finally returned to our apartment after 2am and went to bed pretty much immediately.