Saturday morning I left Périgueux to head to Paris to meet up with Karen; we also ate lunch with Katie because she stopped in Paris before getting on the bus to go to Belgium. I always love being in Paris. I've said this to a few people recently, but if I were to live in France again, I wouldn't want to be in Paris. Part of that is because I just feel so much more comfortable and at east in big cities, and part of that is because I just love Paris. I can even get over the stereotype of rude Parisians. Usually. But it just doesn't get old wandering around Paris because it's so beautiful and everything is so interesting and so old!
Karen hadn't been to Paris in years, so I pretty much told her we should do whatever she wanted to do, though I did request that we go to Père Lachaise cemetery, the biggest cemetery in Paris. I'd never been there before and it's well known as the burial site of people like Balzac, Jim Morrison, Molière, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and Proust. It was really interesting actually.
This shows how raised-up from the street the cemetery is. Probably because there are hundreds of thousands of bodies in the cemetery and lots of them are stacked up.
Walking around. Most of the "graves" are these mini-crypts that serve for entire families. I don't know if that means that people are stacked up underneath or if they've been cremated.
Molière's grave. It had little theater masks on the side of the coffin (sarcophagus? sepulcher?) to show what he had done during his lifetime.
Jim Morrison's grave which you can't actually get too close to. Apparently parts of the stone have been stolen in the past. Also, I still don't know why he's buried in Paris...
One of the older, more overgrown parts of the cemetery.
Every time I have typed the word "cemetery" in this post, I have spelled it wrong and typed "cemetary." So, moving on:
In the evening we saw the opera building from the outside and, very happily, bought some Starbucks. (We went back there again today.) Fanciest Starbucks I've ever seen:
Leave it to Paris.
Afterward we walked all the way up the Champs-Elysées (long walk) and decided to go up the Arc de Triomphe, something neither of us had done before. Being an assistant came in handy because since we were under the age of 25 and could prove with out passports that we were legal residents of France, we got to go up for free! Which, no surprise, was totally worth it! It was neat to see a totally different view of Paris and to look all the way down the Champs-Elysées.
City of Lights.
And the fanciest light of them all!
An American guy offered to take a picture of us. So now we know we'll have at least one picture together from our trip!
The next morning, today, we did a lot more wandering, which is really the best thing you can in Paris. Our hostel was fairly close to Montmartre, a very nice area of Paris with hills and winding streets - it feels completely different than most of the rest of Paris, actually. It's also topped by Sacré Coeur, a big basilica - which was designed by the same architect who designed the cathedral in Périgueux, a fact I may have mentioned before. I had been to this area before, but since we got up and left the hostel really early, we got to the basilica and the neighborhood before the crowds, which was nice.
Sacré Coeur - definitely a different look than the other famous Paris cathedral, Notre Dame.
There were a ton of very impressive paintings for sale by the creators in a square by the basilica. I think I want to get nice paintings/drawings of different scenes of Paris when I'm a real adult and start decorating my own apartment/house. I really liked a lot of the paintings that I saw, and a lot of them really were quite impressive.
We wandered for much of the afternoon and had a lunch of bread, cheese, fruit, and chocolate sitting in front of Notre Dame. (Karen said, "Do you ever say to yourself, 'Is this really my life?'") We walked through the Latin Quarter and the Louvre (we really saw a ton of Paris over about 36 hours) area before picking up our luggage and heading to the train station to come to Rouen. Here are a few pictures from the rest of the day:
Sailboat in the fountain at the Luxembourg Gardens.
I took this purely to show this thought: "Oh my gosh everything is open and people are shopping and we're in France and it's Sunday and I love Paris."
Close to Notre Dame. Such good weather today!
Walking along the Seine on the way to the Louvre.
And the Louvre and the glass pyramid. There was, of course, a monstrous line to get into the Louvre. Though judging by the lines we saw elsewhere, it was probably nothing in comparison to what it was when I was there with my family in December. There were definitely tourists around (of course), but it wasn't too crowded. We didn't even have a line at the Arc de Triomphe!
Tomorrow we'll get up and explore Rouen for the day and also think about what we want to do when we head over the Caen.
Also, it's so nice not to be in a hostel tonight (or for the next five days!)
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