Ordinary Gweilo

This is a rather strange story from France that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in the SCMP.

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries. “We have no idea whatsoever,” a police spokesman said.

The next day, The Guardian had some answers:

There are, at most, 15 of them. Their ages range from 19 to 42, their professions from nurse to window dresser, mason to film director. And in a cave beneath the streets of Paris, they built a subterranean cinema whose discovery this week sent the city’s police into a frenzy.

Building a fully functioning subterranean cinema was, the LMDP admits, a more than usually stiff challenge. The project took some 18 months to complete, though most of the hard work – including shifting a large pile of rubble off the terraces, and shoring up a couple of walls – was done in three or four weekends.

With their long experience of such matters, the group’s technicians had little difficulty piping in electricity and phone lines.

“The biggest hassle was that everything – tables, chairs, bar, projector, screen, the lot – had to fit through a 30cm by 40cm hole on the surface,” Lazar said. “When the police finally worked out where we were getting in, they couldn’t believe it was the right place. It was so small.”

Weird.