Famous cemetery and Mom's visit (part 1)

For the past week or so, I haven't been doing much except resting and cleaning the place up for when my mom comes to visit me, but now that she's here, I've been so busy sightseeing and eating well and having fun, that now I actually have good material for the blog!!

Mom's flight got in last Thursday at 9:30am and I went to meet her at the airport. I took her back to the apartment, made her some breakfast, and let her rest a little, and then the sightseeing began...

Since she's been to Paris twice already, my plan for her visit is to show her some really cool spots that aren't as touristy. I started by taking her to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, which is where a lot of the famous people in history were buried, and is one of the most famous cemeteries in the world.


One reason why I think this cemetery is so unique is that the graves are so elaborate and a lot of them are like mini-mausoleums that contain whole families of people. The really big ones (from the aristocratic families) can be as big as a regular sized building and can hold hundreds of people inside.


The cemetery mostly looks like this, with the stone graves and the uneven walkways.




This is why most people come to see the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise... for Jim Morrison's grave. It seems a little sad at first to know that the most famous grave in the cemetery looks so small and unoriginal, but we found out while we were there that this grave was actually a replacement for what Jim Morrison's grave used to be. It was big, elaborate, and eventually destroyed by adoring fans who wanted a piece of the tombstone to take as a souvenir. As a result, the grave stone was replaced by the less-attractive, but still intact memorial here.




Creepy picture... I wanted to try and capture some of the ambiance in the cemetery. :)




Everyone knows about the Louvre, but not many people know that one of its wings (the one containing the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo) was named for ths man, Vivant Denon, who used to be the musem's director after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1801).




Remember the famous French mime, Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007? This was his grave.




I didn't know this, but Marceau was actually Jewish, and the tradition for the Jewish graves is to leave stones instead of flowers, because flowers die whereas stones will remain forever. Makes sense to me!




This was the grave for Molière, who was like the French version of Shakespeare.




Ok this one has quite an interesting story behind it. The person who was buried here was named Victor Noir, and his lifelike statue has become a sort of fertility monument because of how big his package looks (ha ha). The legend is that if a woman places a flower in his top hat and rubs his package that it will enhance her fertility or bring her a husband soon. As you can see in the picture, that part of the statue is well-worn down (ha ha!).





Armand Peugeot, the man responsible for the French cars.




Edith Piaf! No explanation necessary.




I didn't know this before, but within the cemetery, there are a handful of elaborate memorials to those who died during the Holocaust. This one was dedicated to the victims of Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany.




Another memorial for the Holocaust. I thought this one in particular was very moving.



And another... I think this one was depicting the victims ascending into heaven after death.



Ok, back to the graves...
This one was for Gertrude Stein, the famous American author. She was also Jewish (and has lots and lots of stones).





This grave is for Oscar Wilde. See all the red dots all over it? Those are actually lipstick marks from women kissing the grave.





Mom and I kissed it too!! :)


While we were walking around the cemetery, we randomly met someone who seemed to know everything there was to know about the cemetery and the people who were buried there (he's where I got most of the information I told you before), and if it weren't for him, we wouldn't have seen even half the number of graves we saw that day. We eventually figured out that he does individual tours of the cemetery and that he's been doing that for at least 20 years. Here's a video of him explaining the Oscar Wilde grave to my mom:







It's very expensive to be buried in a grave like the ones in the pictures above, so most people now are cremated and placed here instead.




After the cemetery, we stopped by a café to warm up a bit before walking back to my apartment. Mom snuck in a picture of me there...

After we rested up for a bit, we met up with Monica to go have a nice dinner in the Bastille, close to where I live. We ate moules marinières, which are mussels cooked in white wine, and served with french fries (so yummy!). So the day in all was a pretty good start for my mom's visit!


Bisous XOXO