Paris

I do have to share our travel adventures on Tuesday. We decided to stop at our boulangerie/patisserie for a croissant and hot drink…closed on Tuesday. No worries, there would be another one. We finally found one, and the croissant was so bad I tossed it in the back seat! No worries, right? After a 4 hour drive to Bourges to drop off the car, we had extra time to eat lunch. Only problem was all the restaurants/cafés close from 2:30–7:00 and it was 2:30. This has happened repeatedly to us! We walked to the train station and discovered that the trains in Bourges decided to go on strike today! The only way to get to Paris and not sleep in the station was to take an $80 taxi ride to another town where they weren’t striking and catching the train. OK…it worked and we arrived at our Paris apartment, which is lovely. Only problem…no electricity, and it was dark. We had to use our phone flashlight to call the number given. Elizabeth was trying to follow directions from a sweet girl who spoke little English. She kept saying “Upstairs” and “Downstairs” when giving directions about the electrical box. She meant the top and the bottom of the box! Well, we asked for someone to come and had to wait for the owner to be contacted. By 8:00 we had lights. We dragged ourselves out to find food and settled for a quick sandwich at a bar nearby. It was just one of those days!

We woke up in Paris ready to go today, and first on the agenda was Père Lachaise cemetery with a tour guide who was exceptional. There are incredible stories of the deceased. We passed by the graves of some famous names…Jim Morrison, Molière who was France’s “Shakespeare”. There’s Edith Piaf who was France’s beloved national singer and whose husband drove her dead body sitting upright all the way from Provence because she said that she wanted to die in Paris! Oscar Wilde, whose gravestone is stained with permanent lipstick kisses. It’s funny because he hated women and wrote of his hatred!

A journalist, Victor Noir, is the strangest and one of the most popular. He was shot by an angry prince and died in the street. He became a symbol of revolution. His gravesite has a life size bronze statue of him (with unbuttoned trousers and a protrusion) and it’s as he looked when he died on the street. Well, it has become a symbol of sexual satisfaction and fertility! There are a whole bunch of superstitious rewards if you do various things to it! You can see the worn areas on his body! The government put a fence around it, but the women of Paris protested and they had to take it down!

The “Jardin du Souvenir” (Garden of Remembrance) was quite different. It is the place where relatives can disperse the ashes of the deceased who have been cremated. See the photos to see the lines of ashes.

The most powerful were the many monuments to the Holocaust’s victims in one section. It was extremely moving.

What a beautiful day it was for a walk through the Luxembourg Gardens which is one my favorites to visit in Paris. We ended the day with a Seine River night cruise on the Bateau Mouche.Read more