We arrived in Paris last Saturday and spent three days exploring. Then on to Angres, just south of Lille for a night before spending our last day driving through Belgium and most of the Netherlands. A night on a ferry and this is the penultimate sentence we will write of this post. We are back in Scotland… nine miles to go. Even back in January, in those almost unimaginable pre-Covid days, we had plans for this week. We were to head north from Atami, to Matsumoto, and hopefully from there to see some monkeys.
We should have summited early on Wednesday morning and spent a night nearby before heading back to Tokyo and the airport for our flight home very late on Friday. We should have got back to London at lunchtime on Saturday and the plan was to get a train — overland trip, remember — back to Berwick-upon-Tweed. We were hoping someone might pick us up and take us home…. The parallel worlds of our trip have become multiple worlds too. However, with cases rising in Belgium and restrictions tightened, we cancelled that booking last week and stayed in France instead.
Where do you start in Paris? Silly question. You go to the Eiffel Tower. So we did. After that, the lift is the only option a good thing , so up we went. Then down, and down, and underground. Lucy had read about the Paris Catacombs and asked to visit. You descend a spiral staircase and then walk for what feels like a very long time through a series of gloomy subterranean tunnels before coming into an open space. There should be a series of information panels, but they were all covered up to prevent visitors standing around too long, breathing in this enclosed space.
And there are bones. Wall and walls and endless corridors of skulls and femurs, neatly, sometimes artfully, arranged and grinning at you. It is estimated that there are more than six million six million people here, all jumbled up, with all the other bones piled behind the tidy structures. Some of them will be in the region of years old. It is the most extraordinary, quiet and eerie place. Not scary as such, but an inescapable reminder of the brevity of life and very hard to forget.
The Louvre is the biggest art collection and most visited museum in the world. Any visit, particularly one with children, can barely scratch the surface. We gave ourselves a time limit no more than an hour before we break for a coffee and a target Sophie wanted to see the Crown Jewels and dived in. Highlights for us: the Raft of the Medusa Gericault , the Davids and Delacroix, the extraordinary building itself and some cheeky Roman ducks.
