Another Day, Another Cemetery

Maybe Mom and I are kind of partial to cemeteries because we met in one, so here we are again.  The Pere Lachaise cemetery is the largest in Paris and has many famous people buried there.  It's built on a hill and if you go in the wrong side you have to go uphill to see anything.  We went in the wrong side.  The streets are very old and are made of fat cobblestones which grabbed the front wheel of the poussette and threatened to throw me out, so after awhile Mom put me on my leash and let me walk while she pulled the poussette over the steep, bumpy ground.  The cemetery covers over 118 acres of land and holds the remains of over 300,000 people.  The locals call it the city of the dead and it does look like a city of miniature houses with winding lanes but no occupants.  The trees and feral cats are the only living things there.  Some of the sepulchers are crumbling with age and need shoring up to keep them from falling in.  Some of the famous people who are buried there are Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Abelard and Heloise, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Gustave Caillebotte, and Frederic Chopin, in addition to 152 other "most famous" on the list.  On the farthest corner of the cemetery was an area dedicated to war victims.  Several memorials honored those who died in the concentration camps of WWII and there was a section of the outer wall which held a plaque commemorating those revolutionaries of the Paris Commune of 1871 who had been executed there and buried in a common grave.  This is the 140th anniversary of that revolution and there are several exhibitions in the city which memorialize the event.

We had lunch at a corner restaurant near the cemetery which turned out to be not only delicious, but quite entertaining.  Our waiter was a Berber from Algeria who was a jazz musician and had been living in Paris for the last 20 years.  He had a very interesting history which included being forbidden to speak his native language in Algeria and, at one point, when he was a university student, having to hide in the hills from government troops.  He was planning to go to New York to become successful in his musical career.  We sincerely wished him good luck.  While we were having lunch, something mysterious was going on.  Every corner had several French policemen standing by and there were police cars and vans parked around.  A policeman started to stretch red and white diagonally striped tape across a parked car and soon a tiny police tow truck came and towed that car away.  While it was gone, the policeman stretched the tape across the next car and soon the tiny tow truck came back and towed that car away.  While we were having our lunch, the police had impounded every car on the block, one at a time.  We asked our friend, the waiter, why they were doing this and he told us there was going to be a demonstration so they were clearing the streets.  We felt sorry for the owners of the cars who would come back to an empty space.

Coming...

Going...

All Gone!

Walking in the cemetery, I picked up a lot of dirt, debris and cockle-burrs so I had to have another bath.