Paris - Parc Disneyland

Christmas Day - Parc Disneyland

25th of December, 2016

On Christmas day, we elected to visit Parc Disneyland (formerly EuroDisney - not sure when that name changed) and things were looking good - a forecast top of 13 and the roads in central Paris were virtually deserted.

It was not to last - Disneyland was quite busy. I wouldn't say it was at capacity, but with some waitying times of 55 mins for rides, I'd rather not be there it it were any busier.

Merry Christmas from the Larmours

Main Street Christmas tree

Every few mins along main street, they would play wind noises and fake snow would flutter down from the roof-tops. It's hard to capture on the camera, but you can just see it on Jemima's beret and nose.

Space mountain and the Nautilus 

Sadly, none of the Star Wars stuff existed - all coming next year!

The Tea Cup ride was SCARY!!!!

Partially to get out of the cold, but also to have Christmas Lunch, we headed for the Lucky Star in Frontierland, complete with puppet stage show.

Olaf and Sven photo-bombing a photo of Max & Jemima

On the train around the perimeter of Disneyland

Skull Island

Jafar! Moments before a child called out "Jafar", he stopped and looked, then a girl called out "Jafar" and he chased after her for a few steps. I'm sure both kids got the fright of their life, but it sure was funny!

The nightly parade down Main street

Paris Catacombs

The Catacombs

When Paris had a population of around 500,000, it had one main church and as tradition dictates the church grounds were also the cemetery. The problem was that because the church had been burying Parisians for so many years, the cemetery was out of room - in fact, it was a couple of meters higher than the surrounding streets due to the bodies that had been buried many layers deep in the cemetery.  This was also causing issues with contaminated groundwater int he surrounding area.

Paris was suffering many buildings being reduced to rubble caused by collapses in the catacombs far below where the Romans had originally quarried the rock to build Paris many years earlier.  Engineers were shoring up the catacomb tunnels to prevent more collapses at the same time as the cemetery overcrowding problem was coming to a head.

The local government in Paris decided that this situation could not continue and that the bodies from this church cemetery and their other smaller ones should be moved to the catacombs deep under Paris. In 1785, the first group of bodies were moved to the catacombs.

It took 65 years but eventually around six million bodies were  moved. Burials were banned in Paris to avoid the issue getting worse. Now to be buried within Paris, you either need to be VERY famous, already own a family plot or you are cremated and the ashes could be buried. Beyond the boundaries of central Paris, in the suburbs and surrounding cities.

 

Sculpture of Palermo Palace in Spain - carved by an ex-Spanish prisoner who later worked in the catacombs. This palace was all he could see from his prison cell (allegedly) 

The artist that created these was apparently building a separate catacombs entrance to enable the public to see his work, but was killed in a cave-in during that effort so his work was only visible to the public once per year on the day of the dead or once the Catacombs opened to the public recently.  

In some sections, you can see the water table level - well below the 20m below the surface that most of the catacombs are at.

Some interesting fossils were found during the construction/filling up of the catacombs.

The rest of the images probably don't need any captions - they're pretty self explanatory; lots of bones....

View from the Hotel rooftop bar

I had to take a photo from the rooftop bar of the Hotel (Holiday Inn Notre Dam) just to show the 'higgledy piggldey' araingement of the rooftops....

... and of course the Eiffel Tower at night,