It has certainly been a busy week or so in Paris... I ought not to go into meticulous detail on everything we did (for example, our tour of the Parisian sewer system is probably best left to the imagination) but I can throw out a few highlights that stand out for me.

First off, an old friend from college, now teaching in France... I havent seen her in three years, and we had to go all the way to Europe to catch up with her, but we did it. So we did the classic Paris thing and sat at a cafe on St. Germain in the Latin Quarter, drinking 5 euro coffees and talking the afternoon away.

Also on my "excellent list" is the tour of the catacombs... Paris is famous for its extensive and mysterious underground network of passages, and we got to see the part where they buried over six million Parisians from various centuries gone by. The walls are actually made out of the stacked up skeletons, with skulls grinning out at you from everywhere... spooky is an understatement!

We also spent time strolling the Seine, visiting weird art galleries and a few museums, mangling the French language, and pointing at the Eiffel tower from various locations. Not to mention plenty of time put in on the metro... our hostel was, shall we say, on the outskirts. But it was well worth it to have a big kitchen and a low price. And besides, we could still see the Eiffel tower out our window.