day six: paris

We slept in a bit today, again to try and fight off the impending cold Robin is developing. We hit the streets around 11.

• We take the Metro to Montparnasse and start looking for breakfast.
• We find a side street with about 700 creperies and pop into one of them that has english translations on the menu. The place is tiny and very crowded. The waiter is slammed and we have a few minor difficulties with ordering. He is understanding my fractured French, but didn't get the concept that these moronic Americans were placing special orders. Robin got her crepe with the added tomatoes and mushrooms (champingions), but i htink he thought i wanted extra ham in mine. Hers is delicious and the jam-filled crepe is amazing.
• Next we walk to the tourist entrance to the Catacombs... Under the the streets and buildings of Paris are hundreds of miles of tunnels and chamnbers. They were originally built in Roman times as quarries. A few hundred years ago, the cemetaries had filled up so they dug up the remains of 6 million people and relocated them in these passageways. Some are just in piles, but many are stacked neatly with a few designs in the bone displays. Most sections are labelled by the cemetary they came from, but no individual remains are indentified. This self-guided tour takes about an hour and only shows a very minute portion of the catacombs of Paris. Other areas (outside the tourist area) were also later used by both the Nazi and resistance forces (sometimes very close to each other), and more recently by secret movie-loving societies and drug dealers.
• Upon leaving the depths, we ride the Metro to the Trocadero, which is right across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
• We cross the Seine and head up to the second level on the tower. The crowds are very light based on what Shawn and Anna tell us when they visit a few days later. It was very cloudy and cold, and visibilty was not great at the top.
• Metro to small, predominantly Jewish and Lebanese neighborhood for dinner at Piccolo Teatro. This is a very small and quaint all-veggie restaurant which seemed to have an odd abundance of American patrons (maybe half)-- hmmmm, not many French vegetarians, we're guessing?
• We walked through a very hip art fair prior to our meal -- lots of fog machines and wrought iron sculpture. The DJ was workin the Powerbook for some ambient noise and a cancan girl on stilts greeted us at the door.
• A ride on the Metro back to the hotel and we did a bit of laundry before bed (as per usual) in the room. You gotta love those heated towel racks (that substitute as a dryer for us). ;-)

Gavin & robin