October 23-24, 2018
Back on the road at the beginning of a 6 week, three country, two continent trip.
It was a long day of travel and the airline seats seem to be getting smaller, or maybe I have been expanding. Perhaps I may need to invest in business class for future such trips.
We left for the airport in SLC over three hours before scheduled departure. That was a mistake. Not only is it a shorter trip to the airport than in LA, but it is much easier to get through the airport check-in and security processes in SLC than LA. When added to the flight departure delay, we found our selves with plenty of waiting time, and no airport lounge. However the airport had good Internet connections.
It was a 2.5 hour flight to Chicago and then an 8 hour flight to Paris. On the former I experienced a rarity, the flight was only 2/3s full. On the latter, the flight was full and we were seated amongst a group of enthusiastic French teenagers returning from a trip to the US.
I watched two movies, read a substantial portion of Angela's Ashes and slept a little on the latter flight. We arrived in Paris on time about 10:00 am. It took us almost one and a half hours to get to get out of the airport. Walk to immigration (first entry stamp in my new passport, aside from the Sudan visa entry stamp which had necessitated the new passport), wait for luggage pick-up, there was no customs and then negotiate the Uber ride. We took a group Uber which just squeezed in all the luggage and then took the 30 minute ride to the hotel.
We are staying at the XO Hotel. Nice up scale hotel. Still small rooms like most Parisian hotels, but at least the elevator is large enough to carry both of us and our luggage. It is located just north of the Champs Elysees area in arrondissement 17. After we checked in (our room was available) and unpacked we had been traveling, and mostly awake, for 22 hours. However with a burst of adrenaline, and a desire to get on to Paris time we decided to forgo a nap and set out for the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise.
A short walk took us to Marechal Juan plaza where we got on the #3 metro at the Pereire station. We purchased the 10 trip Metro package for 14.9 euro. The individual fare is 1.9 euro.
It was about a 25 minute ride on the Metro. Outside of the US as I ride metros I always wonder why we cannot have metros that are as efficient, frequent and clean as those in the rest of the world.
We exited at the Pere-Lachaise station from which it was a very short walk to the cemetery.
Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise is a 44 acre cemetery which houses over 70,000 tombs, over 800,000 bodies and scores of memorials. It claims to be the most visited cemetery in the world. It was established in 1804 in response to neighborhood graveyards becoming full, perhaps as the Revolution's guillotines or Napoleon's wars increased the death rate. At the time it was in the outskirts of Paris and conflicted with the Parisian tradition of being buried in the quarter in which one lived. That tradition was successfully overcome when the city fathers exhumed the bodies of some local celebrities and reburied them here.
Walking through the cemetery's grounds was like a stroll through a verdant sculpture garden. The leaves were turning and the tombs were many and frequently ornate. Paris residency is the only requirement to be buried here, so it has a cosmopolitan and in some cases, an international flavor to its inhabitants. We stopped by, among others, the grave sites of Chopin, (we directed a group of Japanese tourists to his site) Moliere, Balzac, Edith Piaf, Bizet, Gertrude Stein, (who was accompanied in death as in life by her partner, Alice Toklas) and Imre Nagy. The last was an elaborate memorial since he is no longer actually buried there. His body had been there for over thirty years after he had been murdered by the Russians for leading a 1956 liberation movement that was finally shutdown by a Russian led Warsaw Pact invasion and the resulting fleeing of 250,000 Hungarian refugees. (Ironic that 60 years later the Hungarian government is among the leaders in the anti immigrant efforts in Europe.) His body was repatriated to Budapest in the early 90s after the fall of the communist government. We saw that grave site last year. There were many other grave sites containing the remains of other famous people which we did not have time to visit.
However the rock stars of the cemetery are clearly Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Both of their sites are now protected from the favors of their fans. At Morrison's site there were lots of flowers and visitors who were bone many years after his death. At Wilde's site there are many lip stick kisses on the Plexiglass which surrounds his tomb.
One grave site has a supine sculpture of a Victor Noir, a nineteenth century journalist who at age 22 was killed in a duel. During his short life he established a reputation as a ladies man and consequently in death he has become a sex star as woman rub his crotch area , which now is very shiny, in an effort to improve fertility.
Around the outskirts of the cemetery are about a score of memorials to man made disasters and tragedies, from memorials to sea and airplane crashes and the Holocaust. Two of the most moving were a sturdy granite arch commemorating the victims of Dachau and small wire replicas of the children killed. There were many visitors in the cemetery.
By the late afternoon we were running out of energy and it was getting close to closing time. I thought that if we exited the cemetery closest to the Metro station it would be a more pleasant walk. Instead we found one exit after another closed and so we had to walk twice the length of the cemetery to exit. On the metro ride back to the hotel I was almost falling asleep so we decided to eat dinner close to the hotel. Unfortunately it was about 6:45 and most restaurants seem not to open for dinner until 7:00 at the earliest, many later than that.
We waited outside Bacino, an Italian restaurant, until it opened at 7. We were the first, and for a while the only customers. We both ordered a plate of the day and got a fish dish and salmon lasagna, Good food and inexpensive wine. The flour less chocolate cake for dessert was just average.
By 9:00 we were exhausted and early to bed.
Jim Morrison grave site
Children's Holocaust memorial
Strolling in the cemetey
Back on the road at the beginning of a 6 week, three country, two continent trip.
It was a long day of travel and the airline seats seem to be getting smaller, or maybe I have been expanding. Perhaps I may need to invest in business class for future such trips.
We left for the airport in SLC over three hours before scheduled departure. That was a mistake. Not only is it a shorter trip to the airport than in LA, but it is much easier to get through the airport check-in and security processes in SLC than LA. When added to the flight departure delay, we found our selves with plenty of waiting time, and no airport lounge. However the airport had good Internet connections.
It was a 2.5 hour flight to Chicago and then an 8 hour flight to Paris. On the former I experienced a rarity, the flight was only 2/3s full. On the latter, the flight was full and we were seated amongst a group of enthusiastic French teenagers returning from a trip to the US.
I watched two movies, read a substantial portion of Angela's Ashes and slept a little on the latter flight. We arrived in Paris on time about 10:00 am. It took us almost one and a half hours to get to get out of the airport. Walk to immigration (first entry stamp in my new passport, aside from the Sudan visa entry stamp which had necessitated the new passport), wait for luggage pick-up, there was no customs and then negotiate the Uber ride. We took a group Uber which just squeezed in all the luggage and then took the 30 minute ride to the hotel.
We are staying at the XO Hotel. Nice up scale hotel. Still small rooms like most Parisian hotels, but at least the elevator is large enough to carry both of us and our luggage. It is located just north of the Champs Elysees area in arrondissement 17. After we checked in (our room was available) and unpacked we had been traveling, and mostly awake, for 22 hours. However with a burst of adrenaline, and a desire to get on to Paris time we decided to forgo a nap and set out for the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise.
A short walk took us to Marechal Juan plaza where we got on the #3 metro at the Pereire station. We purchased the 10 trip Metro package for 14.9 euro. The individual fare is 1.9 euro.
It was about a 25 minute ride on the Metro. Outside of the US as I ride metros I always wonder why we cannot have metros that are as efficient, frequent and clean as those in the rest of the world.
We exited at the Pere-Lachaise station from which it was a very short walk to the cemetery.
Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise is a 44 acre cemetery which houses over 70,000 tombs, over 800,000 bodies and scores of memorials. It claims to be the most visited cemetery in the world. It was established in 1804 in response to neighborhood graveyards becoming full, perhaps as the Revolution's guillotines or Napoleon's wars increased the death rate. At the time it was in the outskirts of Paris and conflicted with the Parisian tradition of being buried in the quarter in which one lived. That tradition was successfully overcome when the city fathers exhumed the bodies of some local celebrities and reburied them here.
Walking through the cemetery's grounds was like a stroll through a verdant sculpture garden. The leaves were turning and the tombs were many and frequently ornate. Paris residency is the only requirement to be buried here, so it has a cosmopolitan and in some cases, an international flavor to its inhabitants. We stopped by, among others, the grave sites of Chopin, (we directed a group of Japanese tourists to his site) Moliere, Balzac, Edith Piaf, Bizet, Gertrude Stein, (who was accompanied in death as in life by her partner, Alice Toklas) and Imre Nagy. The last was an elaborate memorial since he is no longer actually buried there. His body had been there for over thirty years after he had been murdered by the Russians for leading a 1956 liberation movement that was finally shutdown by a Russian led Warsaw Pact invasion and the resulting fleeing of 250,000 Hungarian refugees. (Ironic that 60 years later the Hungarian government is among the leaders in the anti immigrant efforts in Europe.) His body was repatriated to Budapest in the early 90s after the fall of the communist government. We saw that grave site last year. There were many other grave sites containing the remains of other famous people which we did not have time to visit.
However the rock stars of the cemetery are clearly Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Both of their sites are now protected from the favors of their fans. At Morrison's site there were lots of flowers and visitors who were bone many years after his death. At Wilde's site there are many lip stick kisses on the Plexiglass which surrounds his tomb.
One grave site has a supine sculpture of a Victor Noir, a nineteenth century journalist who at age 22 was killed in a duel. During his short life he established a reputation as a ladies man and consequently in death he has become a sex star as woman rub his crotch area , which now is very shiny, in an effort to improve fertility.
Around the outskirts of the cemetery are about a score of memorials to man made disasters and tragedies, from memorials to sea and airplane crashes and the Holocaust. Two of the most moving were a sturdy granite arch commemorating the victims of Dachau and small wire replicas of the children killed. There were many visitors in the cemetery.
By the late afternoon we were running out of energy and it was getting close to closing time. I thought that if we exited the cemetery closest to the Metro station it would be a more pleasant walk. Instead we found one exit after another closed and so we had to walk twice the length of the cemetery to exit. On the metro ride back to the hotel I was almost falling asleep so we decided to eat dinner close to the hotel. Unfortunately it was about 6:45 and most restaurants seem not to open for dinner until 7:00 at the earliest, many later than that.
We waited outside Bacino, an Italian restaurant, until it opened at 7. We were the first, and for a while the only customers. We both ordered a plate of the day and got a fish dish and salmon lasagna, Good food and inexpensive wine. The flour less chocolate cake for dessert was just average.
By 9:00 we were exhausted and early to bed.
Strolling in the cemetey
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