Pere Lachaise Cemetery/London Calling

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Paris. So was today for that matter. 60 degrees and sunny--perfect fall weather. I needed to get out of my apartment and since it was so nice out I decided to seize the opportunity to visit the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Visiting a cemetery doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs. The cemeteries of Paris, however, are so full of history and important people, as well as beautiful sculptures and family graves, that most of them are worth a visit. Last time I was in Paris, I visited the Montparnasse cemetery which too was very beautiful.

Pere Lachaise holds about 300,000 people with about 200 famous ones. I entered at the up-hill entrance so that I could walk through going down most of the time. This brought me in near Oscar Wilde's grave. I didn't have a map so I was only referencing the large one that they put near the entrance.

I ended up doing a little wandering before finding it.

I saw some beautiful fall flowers:
Maybe because it's close to Halloween, but the place seemed kind of spooky. Not in a scary way, but there were ravens and cats wandering around, and things were so mismatched and overgrown.

There were a lot of plaques on graves. This one was very pretty with dried flowers in resin. It reads "Remembrances to our friend".
I came upon the grave of a famous frenchman. I don't exactly know why he's famous though...
Many family's have places where living family members can go pray (on top of the family's tomb). These little houses have some very pretty stained glass and iron work.

Some people seem to take it over the top, though.

I found Oscar Wilde's grave by following the crowd. The sculpture "Flying Kiss" is placed on it. It is traditional to wear lipstick and kiss the grave leaving an imprint. I didn't do this.


After I saw Oscar Wilde, I was far away from a map and didn't know where to find any other famous graves. I decided to just throw caution to the wind and wander. I am glad I did. It was my favorite part of the day.



I found the grave of Sarah Bernhardt, a famous French actress:


There is a huge history of freemasonry in France, so there were a lot of random colomns and pyramids.
I heard scraping and noticed that someone was working on an open grave. Creepy!

I found a Bastian family tomb. That is my grandma's maiden name! I wonder if it's a relation...? I will look at my family tree when I get back to the states.


This was the grave of a painter who had a good sense of humor. It says: "Finally alone!"
Right next to it was the grave of Chopin, the famous composer.
I really liked this headstone--it was a giant book! It was supposed to be the life story of the man buried there.

Looking up the hill was neat.

I eventually found the visitor's center where I got a map. I sat down to rest and found the famous graves that I definitely wanted to see.

There were the famous lovers:

The Opera composer Rossini:

Georges Seurat who painted the famous pointualism painting:
Jacques Louis David, another famous painter:
As I was looking for Balzac, this cat ran by. It was adorable.

Still looking for Balzac, I got distracted by this huge freemason gravestone.

Finally, there was Balzac, a famous French author:

Then there was Marcel Proust, a famous essayist and author:

This was the on-site chapel. It was impressive.
This complex is known as the crematorium and it is where cremated remains are placed:

This was a sad grave. I noticed it because the sculpture was of a small boy and his dog. It turns out that it is the grave of a 7 year old boy who died in 1911.

I found Edith Piaf, the famous French singer of "La vie en rose":


One of the most famous graves in the place doesn't belong to a frenchman, but to Jim Morrison the lead singer of the Doors. They have to barricade his grave because it and the graves around it have fallen victim to vandalism.



At this point, I had been wandering for 5 hours and my feet hurt! I made my way to the metro and got home to sit in my bed for the rest of the day.

Today was spent packing for my trip to London tomorrow! I wake up bright and early at 5am for my 8:55am flight. I will arrive in London at 9:15 and meet up with Alex there. Then, we have a bus ride to the city. We are staying near Paddington station.

My hotel does not have free wireless, so I probably won't be updating for the next few days, but prepare yourself for my future never-ending babbeling on Harry Potter, the Beatles, "'ello govena'!", etc. etc.

Cheers!

Musee Rodin

Yesterday my friend Emily and I (most of my other friends have already left for other countries) decided to visit the Musee Rodin. I woke up and got ready to go meet her, but by the time I was ready to leave my apartment, it had started raining. I was a little disappointed, because a lot of the fun of the museum is the garden, but I figured we could skip the garden if we didn't want to be in the rain.

At this museum using my student ID card and speaking French got us in free (success!), and we started in the museum itself.

I didn't know much about Rodin before I went, except that he sculpted "The Thinker". There were some handy pamphlets that did a really good job of describing his entire life which made me appreciate his works even more.

Rodin was a struggling sculptor who grew up on a road in Paris close to where I live now. After his sister died when he was young, he wanted to become a priest, but his father made him keep on track to be a sculptor. He kept getting criticized because, first, people thought his work was too realistic, then they said it was too unrealistic. Eventually he found a following and was hired by France to create works. He did a lot of things that made people mad like sculpt Blazac and Victor Hugo nude.

He worked in clay, marble, and bronze.



I didn't know that he also did paintings, but I really liked his style.



Below was his first famous sculpture. It represents the failure of France in the Franco-Prussian war.
This is also very famous: "The Kiss"
Another sculpture, entitled "Forever spring"
"Walking Man"


This is a bust of Rodin done by his protege Camille Claudel


This is a sculptre of Camille Claudel done by Rodin
Minerva with a ruin on her head:



These guys look like they're doing the "All the Single Ladies" dance.


A random van Gogh
Scary scary mask
Another van Gogh
A pretty Monet
At this point, Emily and I had been looking out the windows and seeing the garden. It seemed so pretty that we didn't care if it was raining outside. We decided to brave the rain once we had finished the inside stuff.




There was a beautiful rose garden. I kept thinking about the song from the Sound of Music "My favorite things..." Now I know why they said "raindrops on roses." It was beautiful.



The Thinker was in the middle of the garden.


We walked around the rest of the grounds. There were random statues and beautiful fall colors.




The museum from the garden:

I kept seeing this dome all over Paris, and didn't know what it belonged to. Emily and I decided to go investigate after leaving.


I loved being in the garden because it was so green and fresh smelling! I hate how Paris smells like smoke all the time. It was crazy that stuff like this existed in the middle of the city. I am glad it does!


This is the "Gates of Hell" sculpture that was the door to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs for many years. Rodin was obsessed with Dante, the Italian poet who wrote the Divine Comedy. The Thinker is supposed to be Dante thinking about his work. This door represents all of the layers of hell and illustrates famous people from the book. I recognized some of it from when I read part of "The Inferno". It was very realistic.
After a short walk where my shoes filled entirely with water, we were in front of Les Invalides. This is the military complex in Paris (it's the museum of the army and other buildings with the military academy close by). It cost money to go in, and we were both pretty tired, and so decided to leave that experience for another day.

We could go into the gardens for free though. We passed throuh this awesome gate:

And basked in the fall colors.

My feet were drenched and I was tired, so we walked to a cafe by the museum. I got a hot chocolate and a croissant and Emily got some limonade and a pain au chocolat. It felt good to sit in a warm cafe and talk about nothing to do with school.


Later that night, I was curled up in my bed when Laura (my host mom's daughter) came in my room and told me that her aunt and cousin were coming over to celebrate her cousin's 19th birthday and I was invited to eat with them. We had appetizers and talked for a bit. My host mom is from the island of Guadeloupe (in the Carribean), so she and her sister made me a small drink that is a speciality of the island. It was pretty strong, so I was glad they didn't give me too much, but it was good.

We had something super interesting for dinner. A "raclette" is a table cheese melter. You put a slice of cheese in it, it gets all bubbly and melty and then you put the cheese on top of whatever you want like potatoes, ham, tomatos, pickles, etc. You can also put stuff on top to cook it. It was SO GOOD. It was much easier than fondue and just as fun. It would be great for an informal dinner party. I hope they have these machines in the U.S.

*Note: not my picture. I just found this online.

People did look at me strange when I ate the skin on the potatoes. Apparently they don't do potato skins here. To me it seemed kind of silly to was time peeling the potatos when they were already boiled. To each their own.

The evening ended with my and Laura watching a variety show on TV. There were a lot of magicians and acrobats. We tried to figure out the magician's tricks and talked about how the acrobats must have death wishes to do those things.

Here in France it was daylight saving's time last night, so I gained an hour. In theory at least. I still ended up waking up at 8:30.