The Lonely Planet guide for Paris categorises the Catacombs in the "Quirky Paris" section. Drew and I headed to the Catacombs after visiting Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise on 11 January. Quirky or not, we had decided that this day was a day of the dead. The catacombs were fascinating. You go down this long narrow spiral stairway into the bowels of Paris. I think it was a couple of km or something. It was below the Metro at least. I got in trouble (in French) for taking a closeup photo of a bunch of skulls with a flash from a security guard who was lurking undetected in the darkness. That scared me more at first. After the shock I just turned on the English-speaking idiot-savant schtick I'd been using as a defence mechanism for not knowing much French. After one shop keeper spat my change back at me I realised I hadn't said pour favour. The irony is that English speaking people don't have rules about saying please all the goddamn time!
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Catacombs originated in the Middle East approximately 6,000 years ago. These earliest examples were often secondary burials where the bones of the dead were placed in ossuary containers
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