A proper ending – on the Day of the Dead.
For those who’ve followed my adventures, thank you for your attention, encouragement, enthusiasm and for all your helpful hints prior to my trip.
Again, my trip was not exactly what I thought it would be – while some sights I did expect to impress and they did – Versailles, the Eiffel Tower – I found myself very affected and impressed by lesser sights.
European travel has been a dream for me my whole life. And as such, in the past I paid close attention to favorite movies when their settings were in places I wanted to visit. I had a picture taken of myself on the steps ascending to the Church at Sacre Coeur to memorialize my being at the exact spot in a movie scene. I wanted to take my picture on another set of historic steps next to the church, but my sister had no intention of walking up those steps to take my picture. I tried to coax her and ended up getting into an argument with her at the foot of the stairs. They’re famous stairs and alas, due to my sister’s lack of physical conditioning and lack of desire to push herself at all, I have only a photo of the stairs and not myself on them. One of several regrets and opportunities lost due to my sister’s limitations:
But our argument there had a couple of upsides – 1) like London, she could see that I had no patience with her behavior and was putting the blame squarely on her (“yeah, I know your feet hurt and you can’t make it up the stairs, but it’s your own fucking fault.” I wasn’t going to excuse her. She doesn’t have a medical condition for being the way she is, it’s pure laziness.) and 2), there was a group of men working the tourists at the bottom of the stairs at Sacre Coeur. They weren’t exactly beggars like the gypsy girls we’d seen working the crowd at the Champs du Mars by the Eiffel Tower - harangued by their leader like a female Lenin leaning from a traincar – and they weren’t con-men, they were simply men with an angle. Once a tourist got to the bottom of the steps – and they were covering each staircase like a team - they would approach, friendly and cheerful and ask if they’d seen the church and if they answered yes, the men’d immediately wrap a string around the captive tourist’s wrist and begin to braid it, saying it was a tradition of the church, a religious memento, hell, I don’t know what their spiel was, all I know is after the tourist got their kabbalahbabble bullshit thread bracelet, the guys’d hit them up for a donation. We'd managed to dodge them the first time, but while standing there by the stairs next to the lift arguing, one caught up with us.
Picture this, me and my sister, face to face, sniping at each other in plain – well, Texas accented American – English, oblivious to anything else and here comes a guy
“Hello! Do you speak English?”
“NO!” We’d shout, then went back to argue argue argue with each other.
“Are you from America - ?”
“NO!” Bitch bitch bitch.
“C’mon, be nice -.”
“NO!” Piss piss moan moan.
The guy left and not a single one approached us the rest of our visit there.
I had coaxed my sister up a flight of stairs the evening before and didn’t know why she wouldn’t be coaxed again.
Paris is a very historical town. Once the late 20th century rolled around, the French were not about to tear down their beautiful historical downtown and build ugly, glass, high efficiency skyscrapers. They saved that for their suburbs.
One famous business center lay at the very first stop for the St. Paul Metro. La Defense. The reason I wanted to go there was due to another favorite movie –
The Bourne Identity.. For those of you who have seen it, you know that it takes place mostly in Paris. I made sure to go to a few of the places the character had been and take my picture there. A couple of pics were on bridges – Pont Neuf for one – and the other, strangely enough, was a very impressive business park. In one scene, the character is heading for an office his alter-ego had done business with. In the movie, I was perplexed by the setting of the scene. It didn’t look like any shot of Paris I’d ever seen and there was a strange edifice in front of him that looked like a big picture frame.
In Paris, I learned that the big picture frame is an actual building. It is called “Le Grande Arche de La Defense”. Here is me, and this amazing building, doing my Jason Bourne impression:
This building was amazing. We arrived near sunset and the clouds were breaking up and the play of light and shadows against the building’s very symmetrical detailing was incredible:
There were buildings nearby with a play of constantly changing neon lights running under their murky panes of glass, like something out of
Blade Runner or
Logan’s Run, other buildings designed – purposely - like open books standing on end that I’ve read actually house a library. I was overwhelmed. My sister didn’t really share my excitement, but she took pictures readily enough and actually climbed the stairs of the Grande Arche slowly and carefully - but at the top of the stairs found something that
really caught her interest:
*sigh* There’s no accounting for taste.
I can’t help that some places in Paris impressed me more than the traditional touristy places that are
supposed to impress. Another not-to-be-missed highlight of my trip hearkened back to the Jack the Ripper tour we took in London. It's one of those moments in life/on a trip that are sublime - when everything just comes together. Then, it was a night tour and the mood and atmosphere and settings were absolutely perfect. The group was small, we strode dark back alleys to the areas where the murders took place, where the 19th century buildings still stood, mute, with darkened windows like blind eyes staring down at us. The night was cold and sometime in the dark of the evening, as if on cue, church bells began to peal, making us all jump.
The Paris equivalent was our going to the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise.
It wasn’t easily reached by metro. After a few days in Paris, my sister refused to go anywhere where we had to switch trains more than twice. It would have taken 3 transfers and some walking to get to Pere Lachaise. She refused. So I made her pony up her share for a taxi.
This is the famous cemetery where many luminaries of history are buried and we were there to pay our respects. This cemetery is the old kind, not the ‘perpetual care’ corpse parking lots we have in the newer parts of the States:
This place was centuries old, with soaring trees whose branches snarled overhead, dirt paths, winding cobblestone streets climbing up to a terraced level with more graves, shrines and little mausoleums standing like sentinels along your path. It was sad as some of these little mausoleums had been very beautiful and charming – leaded painted glass windows, built-in benches, wrought iron decorative gates and altars inside - but they were falling into ruin, the glass broken, overgrown with weeds, the gates hanging off their hinges, some just desecrated - either the family had moved away or died out and these tombs were just going to fall into ruin and finally return to dust. There were enormous monuments there as well. Obelisks and pyramids, a wall engraved with glyphs standing over the tomb of a Guatamalan man who’d died a long way from home. Asian tombs that were startingly modern compared to the etched and weathered stone tombs around them.
Normally when you visit a cemetery, people go with a sense of respect and pretty much know where they’re going as they are usually there to visit family or friends. Not at Pere Lachaise. We were there to see some famous folks. And so was everyone else we saw. Everyone was in very casual clothing, carrying backpacks and cameras and
all of us had out a book or a map. We were all there for the same reason.
A handsome young man with a Slavic accent asked to see my map and did we know where Chopin was buried? Sure, we pointed. Over there, where that crowd is, the tomb covered in old wreaths, pink roses and other fresh flowers and burning candles. It was so crowded, we didn’t stop. My sister was on a mission.
Here she is:
That is Jim Morrison’s grave. It is the only one in Pere Lachaise that is cordoned off - see the rails? - and has a security guard standing over it 24/7 to keep it from being vandalized. There was a crowd there, too. My sister tossed her flowers on his grave and then we struck up a conversation with a Kiwi and guy from Oz who were drinking red wine over the grave. They had been teaching English in China and had decided to jump on a plane and come pay their respects. Another lady there was very well dressed and after looking at the crowd with some interest, came up to me and haltingly asked in a French accent,
“Who is James Morrison?”
She didn’t know what all the fuss was about.
While my sister was chatting up the two from Down Under, a young Eastern/Middle Eastern looking guy asked me to take his picture in front of the grave, then pulled out a poster of the Doors and had me take another one.
We went up the terraced walk, my sister taking it easy, lest she twist her ankle slipping and jamming her foot between the large cobblestones – it was not easy walking at all – until we found Oscar Wilde’s tomb. It is apparently popular with the gay community. What you see are lipstick kisses covering the tomb. I didn’t kiss it, it seemed a bit unsanitary:
We were headed back the way we came through the cemetery – downhill - looking for Moliere's tomb when the weather changed. It had been sunny early that morning, partly cloudy, but as we walked down back paths toward the other side of the park, we realized that we were alone, no one else in sight.
It’s autumn in Paris, leaves are turning color and falling.
The sky darkened, the wind began to pick up. The air grew cold. Leaves started to drift down, swirling past our ankles and down the paths, trees branches rubbing against each other, rustling. Crows- or ravens - burst from bushes with a blast of wings, cawing loudly, fighting each other over the obelisk tips, flashing rapidly overhead. In the underbrush, black – I kid you not – cats followed the birds silently.
It was suddenly very eerie there.
I loved it.
Needless to say, the gods of Dis smiled on us so it didn’t start to pour rain until we left the cemetery. As all of you who live in large cities know, once it starts to rain, getting a taxi is nearly impossible. We were directed away from one taxi stand toward another by a man who looked like a bum and probably wanted us gone so he could lay down on the bench we were sitting on. He told my sister – somehow – that the next taxi stand was easier to get a taxi and was just a ‘little ways down’. It was more like a quarter mile away. We were soaked above the ankles with cold rain when we finally took cover under the taxi stand awning. But I got spooked when a guy pulled up and parked his Mercedes in the taxi lane – blocking any taxi from actually parking in front of the stand – put on his hazard lights and left. I sat there, cold, wet, my cheap umbrella unequal to the task of keeping me dry, staring at that car and had a sudden realization.
“Hey, weren’t those car bombs in Piccadilly Circus in London Mercedes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Car bombs. Terrorists. Where did that guy go who just left his car here?”
“Oh for gods sake – what is there to bomb here? There’s nothing -.”
At that instant, a door flew open and catty-corner across the street, a bunch of young teenagers came pouring out of what seemed to be –
“It’s a school. Look, I’m not sitting here. This could be a bomb for all we know.”
Amazingly, I got my sister up and moving. She grumbled, but she came along. It was a long trip back to our neighborhood, waiting in vain at another taxi stand, wondering if we were going to have to start bashing heads to get a taxi, then finally decided to find a Metro station - basically walking and riding the metro back to our hotel in Le Marais.
As an aside, Le Marais was the gay part of town, but we saw few shops that seem to cater specifically to a gay crowd and if there was PDA going on, we never saw any.
So, we're wet, I took another wrong turn getting back to the hotel and we found ourselves walking down yet another picturesque cobblestone street and alleyways in an absolute downpour, rain gushing over our feet like a river, my leather boots and socks and pant legs soaked to the knees with cold water and we're shopping, ducking in and out of shops.
But you know? I was happy.
I was in Paris.
