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| Tundun, Abbey and I |
Bonjour!
This is going to be another quick post about two totally unrelated but really super cool things I did last week. This trip has just been a myriad of amazing experiences, but this is among the highlights: we went to the EuroCup!
The EuroCup is a football (read: soccer) tournament that happens every four years in Europe, in the even-numbered year between World Cup tournaments, but its only for European countries obviously. Most countries send a team, and they’re composed of a lot of professional players that are on other pro teams. For instance, Simon informed me that Granit Xhaka normally plays for Arsenal, and English team, but he played for his native country of Switzerland in the EuroCup. So it’s kind of like the Olympics, full of patriotism and national glory and stuff.
My friend Tundun found some pretty cheap tickets, so she,
Abbey and I headed off to the Stade de France (stadium) for the match on
Wednesday. It was Switzerland vs. Romania, and it was such an awesome thing to
see!
First off, the metro ride was crazy. It was absolutely
packed full of fans with face paint, jerseys, flags as capes and oodles of team
spirit. Football enthusiasm can actually get a little crazy/dangerous in
Europe, so I wasn’t sure how the metro ride was going to go considering it was
packed with both Swiss and Romanian fans, but it was perfectly fine! There was
a lot of chanting and yelling, but all in good fun. In fact, I watched a group
of opposing fans bump into each other, and I waited anxiously for a fight to
break out; instead, they all hugged and laughed and a Romanian guy yelled “may
the best team win!” Very bad trash talking in my opinion.
When we got to the stadium, there were people EVERYWHERE,
and security was intense. We went through two rounds of bag checks and then a
very invasive pat-down. The whole process took a while, but I guess you can
never have too much security.
We got to our (surprisingly great) seats and the game began!
I’ve always enjoyed watching football (soccer), and it was so neat to watch it
on a professional scale! It was also nice to just be able to enjoy a game and
not stress about my team winning, especially when my teams usually lose (I’m
looking at you, Arkansas). We just cheered for both teams!
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| This was just after Romania scored and some of their fans set off a flare. They got in a lot of trouble for that. |
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Another thing I did last week – the catacombs! We had to
wait in line for like an hour, but that was actually a very short wait, because
it’s usually several hours long! I’m very glad that I went to see it, but it
was really creepy. There are all these signs about death and also apparently
Robespierre is buried down there somewhere. He was the guy responsible for the Reign
of Terror during the French Revolution, a period in which he chopped off tons
of people’s heads, so you know he’s haunting those underground tunnels.
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| catacomb selfie because obviously; Ireland, Meg, me and Landry |
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| Each section of bones had a sign saying which cemetery they had been transferred from and when. |
Fun fact: the catacombs were originally miner’s quarries, and
they only became a mass grave when Louis XVI decided to move the bones of about
6 million people from their cemeteries to the tunnels because they posed a
health risk in their current location.
It was an eerie experience to walk around down there, made even creepier by the weird quotes carved into the walls.
The tunnels run all under the city, and only 1/800 of the total tunnel network is accessible to the public. HOWEVER, people go down there illegally all the time.
It was an eerie experience to walk around down there, made even creepier by the weird quotes carved into the walls.
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| "Or is death always future or past? It is in the present, that which is already no longer." (Doesn't make much sense, probs because it was written long ago.) |
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| "The eyes of God are fixed on the just and his ears are open to their prayers." |
The tunnels run all under the city, and only 1/800 of the total tunnel network is accessible to the public. HOWEVER, people go down there illegally all the time.
We saw them from our bus window as we were about to leave
for our weekend trip to Normandy. They crawled out of the tunnels like sewer
rats at about 8 a.m. after a long night of partying underground. You can see
that their pant legs are wet from the tunnels. It looked super gross but also
kind of awesome?
So that was last week! I mean I saw other cool things, but
that’s all I have to share right now. I just got back from Normandy, and I will
write a post or two about how awesome that was soon.
À demain!
--Read more from Sydne at http://theyesgirlwrites.blogspot.com/
To find out more about the ISA Paris, France: Arts & French Language at the Institut Catholique de Paris program, check out http://studiesabroad.com/paris
