The Adventures of a Lifetime
So the past few days have been pretty interesting. I left off my last post at Versailles, which David covered pretty well, so I'll move on from there.
We took day trips into Paris from Helen's house. It only cost about 5 euros each way for the bus/train combination - plus, the train ticket can be used once as a metro ticket. We saw a cool flea market and bought French berets XD. I've been wearing mine everywhere. I think David prefers not to look like a tacky tourist like me though. :P
Helen's daughter Catherine had plans to go to a party while we were in town, and she invited us to come along. This wasn't a normal party though. This was a party in the Catacombs, the 200-mile maze of tunnels underneath the city of Paris.
We agreed to meet her at midnight outside of a designated metro station. When we got there, we saw young adults and teens climbing down into a grate in the sidewalk - undoubtedly the entrance to the catacombs. We waited until 12:45 and decided that she probably wasn't coming, for whatever reason - or perhaps we had missed her. Either way, we still wanted to go to the party so we followed a group of kids down the rabbit hole.
The grating was thick, solid metal. It had an opening that you had to put your hand into to find the lever to open it. You've probably walked across hundreds of these in various cities. But this one was different. Inside we found a steep, twisting stone staircase. It was pitch black inside once the grating was shut. Luckily I had brought along a headlamp so I could see as we climbed downwards. According to one of the youths we were following, we had gone down 20 meters (65 feet).
Each group going to the party had a guide - someone who had memorized the route through the catacombs by heart. It would be very easy to get lost in the dark tunnels, so we kept up with the guide. It took us a full half hour to get to the cavern where the party was, which was probably so that the police couldn't find it. (This was technically an illegal party, since nobody is allowed in the catacombs. But a police car drove past while some kids were climbing down the grate and didn't stop, so I assume they have bigger fish to fry.)
There were stretches of our journey where we had to crawl through narrow passageways. Good thing I'm not claustrophobic.
The party itself was nothing like what I expected. It was in the middle of a group of larger rooms with higher ceilings - people hung out and talked in the other rooms if they didn't want to be in the thick of things. The party cavern was hopping, though. They had somehow gotten party lights, booming speakers, and a freaking /mix table/ down into that cavern, and techno was blasting. People were dancing and we joined right in, after promising our guide to meet him every hour. Everyone was very friendly, and they were just there to have fun. One guy used a torch and an alcoholic drink to breath fire - check out my YouTube page at youtube.com/user/phprogrammer to see it for yourself. (Look for Party in the Catacombs.)
I had a fantastic time down there. When I tired of dancing, I did some exploring of the surrounding caverns. I always kept close enough so I could hear the music, though, since I didn't want to be wandering for eternity.
When we got back to the top, I saw that my hand had inexplicably turned silver. Someone told me that's what happens if you touch the walls of the catacombs.
Around 3am, everything abruptly stopped. Music and lights turned off. Nobody seemed to know why, but the crowd started to disperse into various tunnels leading off of the party cavern. We figured that there had been a problem with the electricity (where did they get it from, anyways? Was there a generator or something?) so we found our guide and started to make our way back topside. People were still arriving at this point, too.
When we finally got back up, we had a heck of a time getting back to Helen's house. She had given us a route map for a specific night bus but it turned out that bus was no longer in operation. We found one that went to Versailles but unfortunately we still had a 40-minute walk to Buc. We got back around 6 in the morning and started to pack since we had a 9:40 train to catch. We were exhausted, but we didn't have much of a choice.
The train made it to Nice without any problems at all. We were actually on time for it, which goes against our rule that states "No matter how early you plan to arrive for a train or bus, you will always be sprinting at the last minute to catch it."
Nice was nice. It's on the Cote d'Azur, and the water was a spectacular shade of blue. We checked into our hostel and basically collapsed for the rest of the night. They had a huge collection of movies so it was all good.
Unfortunately it rained for the whole next day. We really didn't do anything of interest since the only things to do in Nice involve swimming.
We went for a swim on the rocky beach the next day. The water was a bit cold but pleasant, and as mentioned above the sea was beautiful.
In the morning we walked down to the port and filled out the necessary paperwork. We got wetsuits, masks, weight belts, and fins, and hopped into the boat with our instructors and another more experience group of divers. On the way to the dive site, we had a quick 10-minute intro to the important skills...how to defog your mask, pressurize your ears, etc. The experienced group went in first with the instructors, leaving us alone on the boat. They were out for 40 minutes or so.
When they came back, the instructors had us hop into the water. My instructor hooked me up to my buoyancy vest, air tank, and regulator, and we swam over to the dive site. He kept his hand on my vest the whole time and pretty much controlled the experience. I put my regulator in and we started to descend by letting air out of the buoyancy vests.
I could hear my breathing underwater. I sounded exactly like Darth Vader XD it was creepy. But it was amazing how clear and blue the water was off the Azure Coast. As we went down, my ears noticed the pressure change surprisingly quickly and started screaming in pain. I equalized the pressure every meter or so though and that neutralized the pain. We descended to about 6 meters. Small schools of fish swam around us, without any apparent fear. I saw sea urchins and exotic varieties of fish. We skimmed over the rock ledge and looked out over the drop-off point. I want to learn to go deeper by taking a class back in the States.
The sights we saw were cool, but the real novelty was swimming without having to worry about coming back up for air. I could take my time looking at everything and just breathe naturally when I needed to.
After about 25 minutes, we came back to the surface. I heard a sound in my ears like air draining from a balloon and figured my ears were equalizing automatically.
We changes back into our dry clothes to be warmer - although it's worth mentioning that the wetsuits were very warm. They had wine for everyone to drink as we relaxed on the way back to the port. (Not the best thing for keeping warm, but the sun had come out and I wasn't too concerned.)
It was a fantastic experience. Worth every penny that we spent, in my opinion.
We said goodbye to France that night with crepes. We had ordered bus tickets to Florence for 4:00am the following morning - basically the only way to get out of Nice. We were in the middle of a transport strike in France and almost none of the trains were running.
Au revoir, France! We had some great times there - from the Pyrenees to the Catacombs to the Cote d'Azur.
I'm writing this from our hostel in Florence, Italy. Ciao! The only problem here is that neither of us speaks Italian so the language barrier will be even more of a problem here. Oh well - we're heading out to have lunch and explore the city.
