My friend Andrea is an American student who's finishing up her time in Paris in a month or two, so she's made a project recently of taking in a bunch of Paris sights before she heads home, and she's been kind enough to invite me along for a lot of stuff. Hence our mostly-pointless trip to La Defense last week, wherein we were rewarded with a giant thumb. Yesterday, I joined Andrea for a tour of Le Musée des Égouts de Paris — that is, The Paris Sewer Museum.


Manning Leonard Krull (left), Jean Valjean.
Here's me, either just before or just after throwing the devil horns; the Paris sewers have never rocked harder than when we two glamorous Americans were down there. Something I should have thought of: the sewers are maybe not the best place for a germaphobe like me. My roommate Lada made fun of me before I went out yesterday, "You are wearing a suit and tie to the sewers?" Hey, it's all part of the plan.

It turns out the sewer tour winds around under Paris and spits you out in right in front of the ( Eiffel Tower... )

When I'm staying at Steve and Trish's place in Collingswood and working in Philly, every day I've gotta take the PATCO High-Speedline, which is basically a small commuter train. (Is it a small train for commuters, or a train for small commuters? It is both of these things.) Sometime while I was over in France, the Collingswood station inexplicably got decorated with these horrifying giant plastic microorganisms, with no sign anywhere (that I could find) explaining what they are or why they're there. Now, I've always been a little bit germ-phobic, and while these images themselves don't freak me out at all, they do remind me every single day that every surface in the universe is teeming with hideous microscopic abominations that want to wriggle their way inside me and kill me slowly and agonizingly. I've concluded that these sculptures-or-what-have-you represent the various types of bacteria and viruses and parasites that live on every filthy, plague-ridden surface of the train station:  

Handrail germ, payphone germ

Door handle germ

 

Escalator railing germ

Bench germ, floor germ

Change machine germ, turnstile germ

 

Person-sitting-next-to-you germ

Unidentified germ, troubled commuter