Paris: Wednesday

[Another scheduled post. Aren't you enjoying these?] [ETA: This might not be scheduled, due to author error. If it's not Tuesday yet and you can still see this, do let me know...]

On Wednesday, we went to look at dead people. Continuing a theme of seeing all the touristy things we never got around to in Paris, we went to the cemetary at Pere Lachaise. Impressive dead-people-houses, those. Some of them were bigger than some flats I’ve lived in!

We saw Oscar Wilde’s tomb – did you know it’s a national monument and so shouldn’t be defaced? Nor apparently did all the people who have thoroughly defaced it, despite the polite little notice on the bottom of it. Random photos of dead people’s houses will follow, because some of them were beautiful, and some of them were impressive, and some of them were just disturbing. The Commander of the French Foreign Legion who was buried below a tomb depicting a statue of Prometheus chained to the rock with the eagle eating his liver clearly had some unresolved issues kicking around, for example. We also saw Edith Piaf’s tomb and Colette’s, but got bored before we saw Jim Morrison’s tomb (all I know about him is that he was a musician – a singer maybe? - and that he drank in the Mazet before I was born, so I wasn’t unduly upset by this omission. If any of you feel particularly deprived, I can make a special effort just for you when I’m next back in Paris to go and see it; let me know...)

Following that, we went to Belleville. This has a reputation as being a dodgy part of town – in this case, I think that just means a high proportion of non-white people, rather than somewhere actively dodgy. Unlike Chateau d’Eau, which was both. Anyway, Belleville is worth visiting, if only for the park at the top of the hill along rue something-or-other (I’ll look it up when I have internet) where you get a fantastic view of Paris, where you can see all the sites, from the Sacre Coeur, along past Notre Dame, the Pompidou Centre, Invalides, Montparnasse and the Eiffel Tower. And no tourists there. We had the whole view just to ourselves. And there’s a lovely little park there, with fountains and grass and flowers and everything. So go, before everyone finds out about it.

Lunch was another picnic in the park, this time in Butte Chaumont, which is one of my favourite parks in Paris. I’d never come to it from the Belleville side before, and it was nice to walk down to the park, and down through it – normally it’s a long climb!

For dinner that evening we met up with a friend of Paul’s, who was lovely and has an incredible flat, and took us to a restaurant near her house which was similarly lovely. The waitress suggested we split two menus between the 3 of us to make it cheaper for us, and the food was good. So, if I can find the name of the place again, I’ll mention it, because if you happen to be in Montmartre, it’s well worth going to. We were going to go to the “easy cool” restaurant with “meuble oldschool”, Cheri Bibi, but it’s so branché, we needed to book. This never occurred to us, obviously, so we had to look elsewhere, where we found the nice place we ended up going to. Cheri Bibi did look nice – though I’m not sure what oldschool furniture looks like; the furniture looked like normal furniture to me. Maybe I’m oldschool too - so if you’re looking for somewhere to eat in Montmartre, book in advance and let me know what the food is like!