A Day With the Dead

Kathryn has a list of places she'd like to visit in Paris, so today we decided to visit two I hadn't seen yet; the Pere-Lachaise cemetery and the catacombs.

The catacombs have restricted hours, so we visited the cemetery first. The Pere-Lachaise cemetery is the resting place for all kinds of famous people, including Jim Morrison (the most visited), Oscar Wilde, and Edith Piaf.

It was a beautiful place, if not a little creepy. We met a tour guide wearing a Doors jacket who hugged us and sang "come on baby, light my fire" when he learned we were from the states. We found Chopin's grave, then followed the likely candidates (tourists wearing Doors shirts) to Jim Morrison. James Douglas Morrison has a fairly unimpressive grave that I would have blown right past if it wasn't covered in flowers and visted by singing tourists. Kathryn read somewhere that he had a bust, but it was stolen.

Anyway, I'm glad I didn't trek all the way to the cemetery just to see Jim Morrison. It was definitely the prettiest cemetery I've ever been to.

Next we went to the catacombs, which were even creepier. Piles upon piles of bones. Later I wondered why it seemed there were only femurs and skulls, but Kathryn's guessing the femurs and skulls were used to make the walls and the other bits were just dumped inside. Ew.

After that it was starting to rain a bit, but we decided to visit the Luxembourg Gardens. On the way there we made a mad dash for a metro train (I don't know why, we weren't late for anything and the trains are so frequent) and I got squashed between the doors. When I finally squeezed through, my bag was still on the other side, but I was holding on. The strap broke, and Kathryn started pulling on the doors. Then a guy got up and pulled the doors apart and I wound on the floor of the train clutching my bag and laughing at the sheer stupidity of the situation. But at least I had my bag.

When we left the metro I found a cheap backpack to load all of my stuff into and we were on our way.

By then the rain had picked up, so we didn't spend a lot of time at the gardens. We tried to get into the palace, but were informed that it wasn't possible and I wasn't in the mood to try out my bad French to find out why.

As we wandered around looking for a metro station, we came across Saint Sulpice, which had to be dry so we went inside. Plus, I was interested to see the Rose Line, just from reading the DaVinci Code.

Clearly I wasn't the first fan of the book to visit Saint Sulpice, because next to the bronze inlaid line there were numerous signs and articles posted about the DaVinci Code. I'd guess the cathedral staff were pretty fed up with it all, considering the snarky nature of the postings: "This church is NOT associated with a cult, it is NOT called a 'Rose Line', it was NEVER a prime meridian, and by the way, the 'P' and 'S' in the window stand for 'Peter' and 'Sulpice', NOT Priory of Scion!" I'm paraphrasing here, but that was definitely the vibe.

Turns out the bronze line was installed by scientists to monitor the rotation of the earth. The sun comes through a window and crosses the line at a different spot at noon every day.

I knew the DaVinci Code was fiction, but I was hoping that bit about the Prime Meridian was true. Shame.