Paris: Day 4

I did a lot during day 4, but there's not a lot to tell about it. I went to the Picasso Museum, which was quite nice; strolled over to Ste. Chappelle, the huge church covered nearly entirely in stained glass, but I'll let the pictures do the talking on that one; went to the Rodin museum and saw some of the most famous sculptures in the world; visited "Les Invalides" were I saw Napoleon's tomb; and visited the Catacombs, one of the creepiest things I've ever done. I even ended the night with a nice bottle of Champagne, because both wine and champagne are amazingly cheap in Paris. Even after all that, all I really got was pictures and no stories. The day was an exciting day, but none of what I can say will really retell it. The pictures are going to have to tell the story for day four.

One interesting thing, however, was when I was walking through the Catacombs of Paris (a place where literally thousands of skeletons were places about 200 years ago), the batteries on my camera ran out JUST as I was about to take my first picture of the wall of bones. A creepy coincidence, indeed, but luckily I had a spare set of batteries on me.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to mention some of the weirder things I noticed about Paris by this point. One of which was the height of Parisiens. There are MANY incredibly tall people in Paris, more than a head taller than me. Interestingly, there are also many short people in Paris, more than a head shorter than me. I imagine I was roughly average height for a Parisien, but the height variation was much larger than it is in American or Asia. This fit with the whole air of Paris, though, which was a strikingly diverse city.

After living two years in Asia, I'm used to a sort of similarity to the people around me. It's not that Asians or even Koreans are all the same, but there are certain features that most Koreans have in common. There was no such common feature among Parisiens. Some were blond. Some were brunette. Some were fat. Some were thin. Only a slim majority was white in my estimation, with a very sizable population of Africans or African-French (very dark skinned, too. Much more so than most Americans. It was very easy to pick out African-American tourists from Parisiens among the population). In addition, there were many many Muslims, Asians, and basically any kind of person imaginable there in Paris. It was by far the most diverse city I've every been to.

R