Goodbye Paris, Stateside tomorrow

Dec. 16^th:

            Ahhh, a final satisfying day is almost complete.  In true tourist style I crammed in a triple-header in the short day of light here in Paris.  After climbing over 700 steps to the second tier of the Eiffel Tower in brittle cold and overcast skies I symbolically exhaled the last gasps of my nine-week trip with bones and tombstones.  The tower was obscured in condensing fog all day.  Even halfway up I was not able to see the top.  The higher I went the wetter it got as the sky’s thickness caused the fabricated structure to perspire.  Vast views were limited to a short radius, but I was not disappointed.  The tower’s fascinating history and geometric construction were riveting enough.  I went from Paris heights to the belly of it depths with a tour of the Catacombs.  After the closure of the city’s largest cemetery, the Saints Innocents, in 1780, an underground site was chosen to move the remains.  Six million Parisian skeletons later it’s a creepy tourist attraction.  Bones and skulls are built into walls of eerie and dank passageways just screaming for a power outage.  To be trapped there in the dark would not have been humerus.  I finished my tour by making the ground level rounds at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise.  That’s the famous cemetery where Jim Morrison (lead singer of the Doors in case you get him confused with some other rocker) is buried.  It was easy to tell that classical music is still much more revered than good old rock-n-roll.  Morrison’s tomb was somewhat hidden in the middle of many much bigger monuments while Chopin’s was big, bright, and brimming with flowers.  Oscar Wilde must have been a wild one, his memorial was a flying pharaoh covered in lipstick kisses.  The depressing cold, crows cawing in naked trees, and so many people of the past immortalized in stone made a grave impression in my mind.  The day before I spent most of the day wandering through the immensity of the Louvre.  There’s a lot of famous artwork in there, most notably the Mona Lisa.  I was as, if not more, consumed by the building itself.  You just have to see it for yourself.  Afterward, I followed the lights and hubbub and managed to run into the Arc d’ Triumph.  It was big and pretty.  Enough about those amazing structures, I’m at the end of this column.