I actually started learning the very basic rudiments of French (unsuccessfully) when I heard of a certain location I'd really like to visit. I've probably announced my intention to some around here but there are actually a bunch of places I'd like to be. I have like a half-remembered list of locations I'd like to go to sometime that are all over france.
For the most part I've tried to deliberately avoid Paris because I feel like that's where everyone goes, but inevitably there are too many cool places there to ignore. Off the top of my head:
Graveyards everywhere. The really detailed bloodborne kind, lots of exquisite mausoleums. Just tons of really fancy dead people everywhere you look, under bridges and in alleyways. There is an entire street paved with medieval gravestones. I can't read them because they're in French. Frenchmen can't read them because the letters are all distorted from the constant stream of piss.
One of these graveyards has a ridiculously detailed bronze statue of a dead guy from the 1800s lying dead above the real dead guy-- And you can tell from where the green has been rubbed off, that people will not stop making out with this dead statue AND JACKING HIM OFF THROUGH HIS BRONZE PANTS. Apparently he was so cool during his life that this is just considered a patriotic service.
There is a neat little library-hotel with beds hidden by bookshelves during the day, that's actually free for writers to stay at for a night or two in exchange for helping out for an hour. (Cystians, don't bother coming here. You have to be productive to stay there.)
Somewhere high above the piss tides, in an alcove leading into a building somewhere, you'll find a marble plaque that displayed the meter, as a public service announcement, to everyone in the 1790s when the meter was made a real standard measurement for the first time. Whenever you play like any open-world game, now you'll finally know, everywhere you have to go is 1000 of those things away.
That one creepy art-nouveau house that feels like an 1800s version of HR Giger architecture. Like, really fluid, biological, and ribby on the inside. Despite all the leaves and bas reliefs of jubilant naked people, something about it looks like you're inside an organism, like the house itself could digest you if you stay too long.
The "secret" apartment on top of the eiffel tower, high above all the piss.
A small privately run museum of 200-year-old pornography
A clockwork sculpture where a naked brass guy with a sword fights a DRAGON at certain times of the day. And, for some reason, also a considerably more innocent-looking crab and a rooster who just seems more disturbed by his presence than actually trying to kill him. Sadly it's been brought to a stop by the ammonia vapor condensing from the air and crystallizing in its joints, but there's probably videos of it working on youtube.
The Sewer Museum, a place with a lot of fascinating history, and, ironically, the one public place in the city where people aren't unzipping and dripping.
However, outside of Paris, there are a lot of other places I'm interested in going to:
The guy who designed a mirror maze in a theme park in my home state that I went to when I was very young seems to have actually been some kind of famous internationally known maze designer, and he made a mirror maze themed around dragons instead of the lame old American commercial vision of the Bible, which I would have to go to France in order to see. I'm more of a normal physical maze guy though, which means I would most likely have to go to the UK (horrors!) to actually experience a real maze.
France has its own native version of the Pukeko bird somewhere in the south, that looks like a funny purple goose. I would like to go see one of them.
I wouldn't eat an Ortolan bunting, but I would pretend I did to make people sad.
Isn't France the place where this postman built a huge splendid palace entirely out of rocks he found? That's cool I'd like to go see wherever that is.
There was another artist from much later, who took a note from the postman and built his own palace for all his art works to go in, and it's like a castle-walled garden with an artificial lake in it. There's a lot of cool sculptures of faces and creatures, it looks kind of like a creepy cartoon temple.
There is a fully preserved medieval city surrounded by castle walls, overlooking a lemonade-pink lake where (I'm not even kidding) flocks of flamingoes live. 10/10, protect that place.
There's a late-medieval kinda fortified bridge, and the Devil lives at the top of one of its towers, skittering around like a wretched little goblin.
Do they allow people to go into Mont St. Michel? That's a cool place.
There's a natural spring that's had like a medieval structure completely built up around it, so it's like this pristine hole straight into darkness underneath like this little cloister of building.
I actually remember the name of the Astronomical Clock of Lyon because it's the most fantasy wizard shit ever and I've been meaning to work pictures of all its weird little functions into a DnD game or puzzle somehow.
I think it's either france or germany that had a library inside this gigantic head that's also part cube.
I think north of Verdun, in a field of crosses, is an ossuary for the jumbled remains of WWI soldiers. It looks almost like a Weyland-Yutani kind of building, and unlike a normal ossuary which can be kind of comforting in its weird way, you know for a fact everyone here went through something unimaginably fucked up. That has to be quite an experience to visit.
There's a house where freaky brass dragons with dead human eyes jump out of the windows on the hour, and possibly eat people, I didn't check.
Albi Cathedral, look it up.
And, finally, the reason (aside from Requiem Chevalier) that I started learning French: In a place called Rocamadour, which also has a castle (though I think it's one of those modern house ones) there is like a forest full of free-roaming monkeys, and you can just sit there while monkeys are around, doing whatever. I think there are other kinds of monkey that are also there, but they're in different parts of the place and taken care of more like zoo animals because unlike barbary macaques, they aren't part of the natural climate of France so much. But I have seen pictures of people hanging out with other kinds of monkeys there, so who can say for sure.
