Another side of Paris
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008Ahh, Paris – city of romance, city of lights, etc etc. Yes, Paris is lovely – until you visit the sewer system.
It was a rather unusual choice of activity yesterday afternoon, but since it wasn’t a nice day above ground – in the five days since we left China, Beijing has had three blue-sky days compared with one for Paris – we decided to check out the ‘Egouts de Paris’ and go on a guided tour of the sewers. It was pretty smelly and disgusting (the picture to the right doesn’t need much further explanation), but actually quite interesting as well. Some interesting sewer facts we picked up:
– Inside Paris’ peripherique, there are two million people … and four million rats. Rats eat triple their bodyweight in garbage every day, so they are an important part of the disposal operation.
– All the sewers are named according to the streets above, and numbered where the houses are. If you lose a ring or something else down the drain, you can call the sanitation department and unless there has been a flood, they will find it 95 per cent of the time.
– They still find swords and other WWII era weapons in the sewers occasionally, as the sewers were one of the bases of the French resistance in Paris. They also find modern-day weapons like handguns which murderers throw down the drain after their deed, only to find that the sanitation department and the police work together to recover the weapon and use it as evidence. And yes, they also find corpses.
Moving right along, on Monday we visited the gothic cathedral at Chartres, about an hour outside of Paris, and the basilica of Saint-Denis in the eponymous suburb in northern Paris. The interior of the Chartres cathedral is very dark but the stained-glass windows, which tell biblical stories (such as that of Noah) and much later ones (such as Charlemagne’s recovery of Mary’s veil), are impressive. The old town itself is also quite attractive but is completely overshadowed by the church, which is one of the most famous gothic (or ‘French style’ as gothic architecture was called in gothic times) cathedrals in Europe.
This evening we fly to Rome, which always excites me no matter how many times I go there. Meanwhile, some photos of France are here.
After the chaos of Beijing, the excitement of the Olympic Games and the exhaustion of working every day for two months without a day off, we needed a holiday. And so we find ourselves in Paris, visiting Wendy’s friend Jessica, soaking up European life after being in Asia for eight of the last 10 months, and blogging again – something that was somewhat difficult to do under the circumstances we were in while in China.
Today was a bit cooler and quieter but this gave me time to reflect on the relaxed pace of life here and why I would like to live in Europe – if we can manage it logistically and work-wise – when we finally settle down. We went to the Sunday produce market in Jessica’s suburb in the morning (the mushrooms to the right were particularly unusual, I thought), had a lazy French breakfast at 11am and picked blackberries in the Bois de Vincennes in the afternoon.
For me, Paris will never be able to top Rome, but it's still a beautiful city with a ... 
Nick