Paris trip 2019

The vast, legendary catacombs hold secrets much stranger than stacked bones.

One of the oldest medical collections in Europe focusing on rare surgical instruments.

A museum of carnival attractions where you are invited to ride the rides.

This massive library holds what was once the largest book collection in the world.

France's most famous cemetery, with some of its most curious tombs.

The macabre collection of Jacques Sirgent, an expert scholar on the undead and all of their trappings.

The very center of Paris is surrounded by a bevy of strange good luck rituals.

High atop the Eiffel Tower is a small apartment built exclusively to entertain the science elite and make the rest of Paris jealous.

A counter-culture bookstore like no other hides in plain sight in the streets of Paris.

This charming cobbled backstreet is the most Instagramable street in Paris, much to the residents' annoyance.

A mechanized clock where a man fights off a dragon, crab, and rooster.

A scandalous Art Nouveau collaboration that set Paris all atwitter at the turn of the century.

A surrealist timepiece by the artist of melting clocks.

19th century pendulum and a clock restored by a rogue group of guerilla artists.

Egyptian Revival movie palace abandoned for decades and restored in 2013.

A museum on the history of Paris, including a set of Napoleon's toiletries, Proust's room, and relics of the Revolution.

Medieval museum built over Roman baths that features famous tapestries of a lady and a unicorn.

This museum houses an imposing skeleton army comprised of creatures great and small.

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.

Behind the pink curtain, Au Bonheur du Jour, an art gallery of erotic archives.

Statue of death tucked in the University of Medicine courtyard.

Indents in the pavement are all that remain from a grisly death machine in Paris.

For one day a week a famed French flower district turns into an avian bazaar.

The history of radiation is on safe display at the foot of a radiation science laboratory.

An overlooked marble is the only surviving in-place 18th century example of the measurement that changed how we define distance.

In the best of all possible worlds, everyone will get a chance to see this statue in which Voltaire's heart is interred.

The curious underground history of keeping Paris clean.

A unrivaled and rather horrifying collection of wax dermatological models.

This former “ante-chamber to the guillotine” has been refurbished to illustrate the brutal history of French justice.

Hidden away in a modern library are the remains of one of the 18th century's most celebrated wunderkammers.

This life-size replica of the Statue of Liberty's flame is also a tribute to Princess Diana by default.

Twelve grave-faced marble angels guard the emperor's tomb at Les Invalides.

A popular shrine where the Blessed Virgin allegedly appeared in 1830, displaying a holy armchair and two incorruptible remains of Lady Saints.

The water-powered carriages are long gone, but for over a century this funicular railway has been the fastest route to the highest point in Paris.

The recovered bones of martyrs slaughtered during The Terror are on display in this church crypt.

This little-known relic crypt holds stolen parts of a Roman Empress.

Architect Le Corbusier built his friend a cubist house to match his impressive collection of cubist art.

Despite being considered a thoroughly American sport, basketball's oldest surviving playing field is found in the basement of a Paris YMCA.

Saintly bones pressed into a wax effigy of a Catholic superstar.

Original cabaret handbills, posters, and feline artwork are a purrfect highlight of the Museum of Montmartre.

This innocuous-seeming building is actually the remnant of a major wartime brothel.

An unusual number plate signifies the building's saucy past.

An odd museum dedicated to French fakes.

This bridge was constructed from the rubble of the infamous Bastille.

With a history of slaughter, feast, and famine, remnants of the pork industry decorate this area--even its church.

This demon atop the Notre-Dame de Paris looks utterly bored.

The celebrated eyesore created by starry-eyed sweethearts.

Exquisite wall sculptures carved in secret by an early quarryman in an obscure corner of the Paris Catacombs.