After class on Monday, my roommate and I decided to head to the North East part of Paris to go and see what my tour book describes as the most “romantic” cemetery. Apparently the dead bodies there aren’t the only things that are stiff.
Romantic may be pushing it, but it was very park-like. But let’s get real, you’re here to gawk at dead people. Famous dead people, sure, but that sort of makes you feel bad for the non famous people buried there. You step all over their resting places to go see some stone that has a well known name on it. Nonetheless, it was fun. It’s like playing a really morbid game of hide and seek, except the graves can’t move, and the bodies have the ultimate hiding spot. So maybe it’s nothing like hide and seek, but you do have to have some great map reading abilities.
They give you this general location where said dead famous person is buried and its up to you to comb through all these tombstones to find it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Search teams are literally formed. This is a normal exchange:
– “Hey, are you looking for Oscar Wilde’s grave, too?”
– “Yeah, where is he?”
– “Let’s split up and look. It’s not like he’s going anywhere!”
And hilarity ensues.
We went and saw Oscar Wilde’s grave, which is adorned with kisses and notes left by passersby, which was really awesome in that defiling tombs kind of way. I really appreciated seeing Molière’s grave. Apparently Jim Morrison of The Doors is buried there, and his was even barricaded. Finding out that Jim Morrison is buried in a Parisien cemetery is like if you found out Santa Claus didn’t grow up in the North Pole, he just outsourced all his labor there. I don’t even know if that makes sense.
We thought we saw Gertrude Stein’s grave. We took pictures and everything. Then I googled her grave when we got home. Not the same grave! We thought Gertrude Stein was some sort of pseudonym, so after 15 minutes of searching we figured this woman named Gertrude with a similar last name must be her. Well some random woman got her picture taken by tourists, so now she can finally rest in peace.
Some other people we saw: Proust, Gay-Lussac, Apollinaire, Georges Bizet, and Chopin. All in all, it was an enjoyable day out being the paparazzi for the passed.
I almost forget the most important part of the story. We took two trains in a half hour ride to get something completely unique in Paris: Chipotle. It was the Mecca of Americans everyone. No really, we dubbed the area Little America. Next to the Chipotle was a McDonalds (colloquially pronounced Mac-Doh here), next to that was a Starbucks, and next to that was a Hard Rock Café. Oh and down the block was the Apple Store. Everyone inside of Chipotle (including, possibly, the person who ran the register) was American. Everyone was speaking English. It was just all a new round of expats hankering for some fake Mexican food from America. And it was beautiful.
Except, the burrito was really small. I’m used to the burritos in America where one is literally the size of a football and could be tossed to you by the server (interesting idea for drive through…perhaps a touchdown-through?). And they only had brown rice here, and had red peppers in addition to green (As you can see, I am a Chipotle connoisseur). It just wasn’t the same though. It wasn’t as fresh as America’s. So that’s settled, I could never move here. That’s a shame.
Up Next: The Panthéon, the one that isn’t in Rome.