I could feel the fresh Paris air dwindle as I approached my twelfth day in the city. Every day felt like a new adventure set in a whole different reality. A sense of urgency flooded my mind as I realized this would end my feverish dream.

After experiencing Parisian nightlife only five hours before, I swiftly woke up and went to the Rodin Museum. It wasn’t an indoor museum with walls covered in tapestries or World War II informatics. Instead, the building led to a beautiful garden with a long pool of water and countless sculptures by the famous Rodin, the first modern sculptor.

After we walked through the garden, stopping by and discussing Rodin’s work and its celebration of the individual, we found a place to sit and discuss the trip and class. Most shared the same love for the city: the architecture, people, work-life balance, greenery, and overall lifestyle, especially compared to the United States.

We discussed last-minute plans for the day to enjoy the last few hours we had on the clock, and the program itself. Self-reflecting on the trip, there’s a huge culture shock.

On our museum walk, one piece caught my eye: Dante’s Gates of Hell. Recently, I’ve been learning about the Catholic religion and was fascinated with Dante’s Inferno. I recognized the sculpture when I saw it and was surprised that it was created by a French sculptor given its Italian roots. Seeing this sculpture was surreal, reminding me how old the artworks are. Lots of the sights in Paris are older than the country I was born (the United States).

After the museum, a friend and I separated from the group to find a place to eat. I had a reservation for the catacombs soon, which gave us only two hours to find somewhere to eat and travel halfway across the city. We settled for an Italian place in the center of Paris, a fairly small and local spot. I had heard from social media that trying black truffle rigatoni was imperative in France, so I had to order that. To absolutely no surprise, I fell in love with the food.

I met up with two other friends to enter the catacombs. I had some knowledge about them from previous museum visits and was interested to see how they would look. I learned about the growth of Paris and the necessity to move graves from four major graveyards to the catacombs, an area originally dug for limestone, much of which was used for buildings. I knew that many of these tunnels stretched across the entire city, so I was ecstatic to see how much we’d be able to travel through and what I’d see.

One of the days prior, we walked through an FFI resistance bunker against the Nazis during World War 2. There were several warnings about the bunker feeling claustrophobic or small. To my surprise, the bunker did not feel this way at all. Comparatively, when I entered the catacombs, my expectations of what the bunker would have been like were what the tunnels were. The walls were close together, especially with the depth of the walls of bones. If I stuck my arms out to my side, I was sure I could touch both sides of the walls. However, I did not try this as I didn’t want to get too close to the remains.

The tunnels stretched for quite a while. The museum allowed us to walk for 20 minutes straight through the tunnels, following a singular path to prevent tourists from getting lost. We saw wells going far down, Egyptian hieroglyphs and writings on the walls, as the catacombs were inspired by those architectural designs, and walls coated in bones and skulls. Many human remains were stacked in an unsorted pattern; however, there were occasional breaks in the mountains of bones with patterns (see the image above) or graves of famous individuals.

The ceilings were low. I’m 5’7″, which is fairly average for a male, and my head was touching the top of the tunnel. The entire experience felt surreal, seeing many graves in one place, out in the open. My brain couldn’t fathom the work it must have taken to move and place these graves along the walls of these mines.

After the catacombs, I had enough time to return to the hotel, get changed, and depart for the farewell dinner. This would unfortunately wrap up my time in Paris, experiencing everything the city had to offer: the people, culture, foods, city life, and history. Although this was my first time in Europe, I felt I could see myself living the lifestyle I experienced. I hadn’t even left, and I was already planning the next time I would be coming back.