Paris, entry #2

(Week in Paris starts in the entry below this one, to read chronologically)

My Napoleonic education continued on Tuesday, the day that every museum in Paris is closed. And so, we took the metro for a long ride out to Pere Lachaise, a cemetery that holds some of the most famous people in Parisian and French history, plus a few who just died in Paris and wanted to be buried there. Celebrities from singers and dancers to military heroes and politicians to poets and artists are buried in Pere Lachaise. The most frequented grave by Americans is Jim Morrison’s, which is covered with flowers and cigarettes tossed in the great musician’s remembrance. Nick scrambled around the graveyard like a kid in a candy store looking for Napoleon’s generals and other buried heroes. The whole place looked ancient, covered in moss, fallen leaves and shrubs between each grave. It was unorganized and unkempt, which added to the old, historic feel of the cemetery. Only a few graves looked like they’d even been added in this century. Many were hard to read, with the names and dates eroding into the stones themselves, and others had nothing but a last name displayed proudly on a family’s headstone. Almost all of them were above ground burials – large boxes of the dead – rather than the simple stones placed above bodies in most American cemeteries. I enjoyed the quiet, winding walk through Pere Lachaise, as Nick raced ahead to check out some Colonel or another. It was a peaceful break from the city and I even got to see some interesting people too. Oscar Wilde was my favorite, buried beneath a huge stone with an abstract head poking out, and all over his grave were pink lip-prints of tourists who came to plant a kiss on the writer’s monument. I didn’t add mine – it felt a little too creepy – but I did have my picture taken with Oscar Wilde. Too cool. And then we wandered to the crematorium, a long building with rows and rows of small boxes embedded into its walls where the remains of cremated people rested. Hundreds of people in little boxes indicated on our map by number. Here, I got see Isadora Duncan, a famous dancer who I’d heard a lot about in my days of ballet.

And then, off to Montmartre! Mom and Dad seemed to love this place so much and Nanny had even told me about where she and my grandfather spent lots of time at his apartment in this area of Paris, so I was very excited to explore Montmartre. It’s at the top of probably the only hill in Paris, sort of like a little San Francisco in the middle of the city, with lots of steep streets and fun shops to discover. Sacre Coeur church sits at the pinnacle of Montmartre, looking down over the whole city, and so we headed there first. At the bottom of the hill though, before boarding the tram to the church, we fell into the oldest tourist trap in the book. Two Jamaican men started talking to us and asked us to hold out one finger each, just for a second and we wouldn’t have to pay anything, they said! So for some reason we just said OK, and held out our fingers, and they looped a series of strings over the tips and started weaving bracelets right then and there. All the while talking animatedly about how much they love the U.S. and Obama, and how these bracelets will bring us good luck and “hakuna matata” and all that – “no worries.” I told them I remembered that from The Lion King and they laughed and kept braiding. When they finished, we each had a colorful, well-made bracelet on our wrists. And then they wanted five euros for each one. No way! We gave them four for the two, instead of a ridiculous ten. Oh well, not the best purchase of the trip but I’m still wearing mine and hope it does bring good luck for the rest of my time here, as it has so far! Even after falling for that one, Sacre Coeur was beautiful, and there was a guitarist singing songs in English at the foot of its front steps. We sat in the drizzling rain to the tunes of John Lennon and watched Paris turn its evening lights on below. Montmartre was full of life and good shopping, restaurants and finally the Moulin Rouge – standing proud and glittering red just like in the movie.