For the second Friday in a row, I found myself blowing into a strange and beautiful city in the middle of the night. After the exhausting train ride, I was overwhelmed by the noisy crowds of late-night partiers and neon lights against a backdrop of towering cathedrals and ornate palaces. In Amsterdam, we wandered around in the drizzle for half an hour puzzling out the transportation system to get to our hotel. In Paris, we made straight for the taxis like the veteran travelers we were. That ride took us by the Moulin Rouge and monuments, cafes and nightclubs.
The next morning, we rendezvous’d at the Eiffel Tower, where we faced a line of tourists that would probably stretch for blocks if uncoiled. I was feeling rushed by our group’s schedule, so I went off to see the city by myself. I wandered south, where I found a farmer’s market and bought what I hoped would be several meals worth of pastries. I then found a place to sit and just boggled at the fact that I was eating French pastries IN FRANCE. I probably looked like an oversized five year-old sitting there with a huge grin on my face and my lap covered in flaky crumbs from my pain chocolat.
My goal for that day was the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Since I had no concept of how huge the city was, I decided to walk there. It wasn’t too long before it started to grow cold and damp. Dampness turned to drizzle, and over the course of the day drizzle morphed to a miserable rain. I was too excited to have my spirits lowered, and I just strolled along the Seine River, taking in everything there was too see. After not too long, I came across a collection of life-sized black stone sculptures of rhinos, horses, and elephants outside a museum. They were obviously of great importance since they were guarded by soldiers with automatic weapons. Other tourists were giving the artworks and their uniformed guardians a wide berth, but since I’m an American, I feel right at home with firepower of that magnitude. I wandered over and took pictures and spent several minutes contemplating the fact that I was contemplating a bunch of sculptures IN FRANCE.
I continued my walk until I saw Notre Dame’s blocky towers rising across the river. Having spent a chunk of my childhood watching the Hunchback of Notre Dame Disney movie over and over again, I was elated. It may have taken nostalgia for my Esmeralda Barbie doll to lure me into caring about masterpieces of gothic architecture, but my mood changed after I waited out the long, snaking line and entered the cathedral. The atmosphere felt holy in a way the insides of the Dom in Köln and the Munster in Bonn didn’t. I’ve been a nonbeliever since elementary school, but I was raised catholic. While probably not attributable to a divine presence, a sense of reverence came over me as I sat in the huge hall. The other sight-seers with their camera flashes and noisy children faded out, and I was alone in the dark with the smell of incense and the faint sound of hymns.
Recharged, I ventured back out into the rain, protected only by a surprisingly waterproof pink pashmina shawl I had picked up at a souvenir shop that morning. I trudged along the river until I spied a garden dotted with abstract if somewhat suggestive sculptures. I had reached the Jardin des Plantes, which for whatever reason was adorned with several vaguely butt-shaped works of modern art. To be fair, there has also a piece that looked like squiggles and a feed trough and one was a likeness of the Grim Reaper squeeing with glee.
Across the street lay the campus containing the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, The Grand Gallery of Evolution, a Menagerie, and assorted buildings which interested me less. First stop was the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, which is French for “Football Field-Sized Hall Full of Skeletons and Assorted Preserved Squishy Bits from Every Creature that has Ever Lived.” Entering the hall, I was met head-on by an army of skeletons of all things that walk, crawl, fly, and swim. The remains of tigers, rhinos, whales, and deer were arrayed like a nightmare version of Noah’s ark. Glass cabinets containing smaller and curiouser creatures lined the walls.
I was going through reading the hand-written and semi-legible tag that described each specimen, and then one name suddenly jumped out at me. A Steller’s Sea Cow was sitting there chilling next to all the other critters that hadn’t been extinct for, say, the last 250 years. Now, I’m completely fascinated by creatures, but I find the animals that humans drove to extinction within the last few hundred years particularly compelling. Almost without exception, they are weird fairy-tale like creatures. Moreover, I love sad stories, and the tragedies of the Steller’s Sea Cows and quaggas and thylacines and all the other extinct creatures nestled in among their still-existent relatives in that hall are entwined with their bones. At one point during my visit, I sat down on a bench, and glancing over my shoulder, I saw a dodo staring back at me from a glass case. All I could think was, “Wow, several hundred years ago this bird was just chilling on its island with its family, doing whatever dodos do in their daily lives. And now all trace of their life is gone and the only evidence of their curious existence in a handful of bones, a mummified head, and whatever records humans deigned to keep of this race of strange birds they wiped off the face of the earth.”
One other highlight was Lucy. At the time I didn’t know it was a reproduction—though the fact that the iconic skeleton off by itself in a relatively deserted corner should have clued me in. Beyond that, I spent some time at the Evolution of the Horse display, and also oohed and awed at the dinosaur fossils with all the other six-year olds.
While I was one of the only visitors who wasn’t either a sticky little kid or a worn-out parent, I feel I lacked the knowledge base to appreciate many of the exhibits. Jars of hundred year-old preserved tracheas from kangaroos, tigers, rhinos, and hyenas are cool, but I really can’t glean anything meaningful from those displays. Maybe next year after I’ve taken Anatomy class….
Oh, also: that case of fetus skeletons displayed standing up like palm-sized big-headed aliens? It’s nightmare fuel.
My next stop that day was the Grand Gallery of Evolution, where my presence skewed the mean age of visitors upwards by several years. Most of the exhibits were rows and rows of taxidermy animals sorted by habitat, presumably the trophy collections of 19th century big game hunters repurposed into something educational. Giraffes and leopards were shot, posed with, maybe served as a conversation piece in some rich guy’s smoking room, and now teach thousands of children every year to care about the natural world. A few preserved creatures were displayed more creatively. In one corner near the stairs, a ferocious tiger was forever pouncing on an Indian elephant, the prey permanently contorted in pain and fear. Off by itself across the room, a faded panda pawed at the walls of its glass gazebo.
A few of the displays were more strictly educational—an exhibit about domestication and the influence of humans on nature dominated the top floor, and many of the walls were lined with cases of insects and other small invertebrates accompanied by sizable informative posters with no English translations.
After exploring all four floors of the Gallery, I headed to the Louvre. It had closed by then, so I decided to call it a day.
The rain fell harder, so I ducked inside a café and ordered coffees until they closed at 8 pm. Afterwards, I got drenched trying to find the correct busstop, but made it back to my room and fell asleep shortly afterwards.
The next morning, I made it to the Louvre shortly after it opened. The scope of the museum was overwhelming, so I just chose an exhibit hall at random to begin my explorations. A cavernous glass-ceilinged room full of marble sculptures. Classical goddesses and medieval martyrs loomed larger-than-life. The back of the room branched into passages filled with smaller works—intimidating stone skeletons and preserved cathedral decorations.
The rest of the museum blurred together, as there was something beautiful everywhere I looked. I saw a hall of gold icons from the dark ages lit by stained glass, a sea of tourists near the Venus de Milo, room-sized canvases portraying battle scenes, countless Passions of Christ spanning several centuries, Rubens, Rembrandts, Renoirs, peasants and farm scenes, crown jewels, cat-headed goddesses, paintings of poorly proportioned animals and fish-eyed people with odd balloonish hands, royalty in ermine cloaks, Egyptian sarcophagi, Islamic treasures, and many more wonderful objects. Oh, and the bathrooms were surprisingly gross.
Five hours later, I was ready to leave the Louvre. As I was looking for a place to eat lunch, I counted nine pet stores on the block directly east of the famous art museum. I played with a few puppies and bunnies, but I really have no idea why so many petshops were there, specifically.
The last landmark I needed to visit was the catacombs. The grey stone building was so non-descript, I worried that I was in the wrong place until I saw the line snaking out the door and down the block. I queued behind a pack of rowdy teenagers with skinny jeans and stupid haircuts, and prepared to wait. After a few minutes, a large official-looking woman came over and told everyone at the end of the line that since there was a two-hour wait, we wouldn’t be admitted before the ossuary closes, so we might as well leave. The teens left, but I decided to stick it out and only had to wait about 45 minutes before I got to climb down the claustrophobic spiral staircase into the old quarry tunnels. I had to stoop in some places to avoid brushing my head against the rough damp ceiling as I walked through the old sewers. The crowd thinned out, and I was alone in the darkness.
At a place where the tunnel widened, miniature buildings and streets were carved into the basalt wall. The plaque stated this hidden artwork was project of long-dead quarry workers. After walking a while longer, I passed through an arched doorway and got my first glimpse of the remains. Long bones were stacked like firewood along the sides of the passage, serving as a levee to hold back a sea of clavicles, digits, pelvises, and other less-tidily shaped bones. Rows of skulls decorated the retaining walls of long bones. In a large chamber, bones were stacked into several urn-shaped columns.
Throughout the ossuary, small skulls were intermixed with the adult ones. Some had large foreheads, or pointed cheekbones, some were toothless, or still had perfect dentistry. I tried to imagine what the 6 millions sets of remains I was looking at and had looked like alive, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. These bones belonged to people like me, people like my parents, people like the obnoxious teenagers in line ahead of me, and in less than a hundred years, we would all be these aging, cracking bones.
Half the bone rooms were closed for security reason, so my tour was cut a bit short. I climbed about 80 stairs and emerged into the daylight. At the exit, my backpack was searched to ensure I hadn’t helped myself to any grisly souvenirs.
The rest of the evening passed quickly—I met up with my group for dinner, and then we caught our night bus back to Köln.
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