TUESDAY-Pere Lachaise

The coolest attraction of the trip to me so far was a trip to Pere Lachaise, the largest cemetary in Paris. They built it in the 1800s when the rest of the city graveyards had become so full of corpses they were truly spilling out. Think oozey. Yup, like that.

They built Pere Lachaise, dug up most of the rest of the cemeteries, and moved all the bones deep under the city into the catacombes (which are currently closed for repairs so we can't see them this time). So relatively speaking Pere Lachaise is pretty young.

And pretty fresh. If you get buried there (or cremated - yup, they've got their own ovens at Pere Lachaise *crackle! crackle!*) if your family doesn't keep up payments on your plot, it goes back to the cememtery and someone else can take up residence. You might be there 10 years or so and then it's out on your duff for some new dead person. Your remains? No worries, you'll join a mass grave with the rest of the people who defaulted on their rent. Misery loves company, no? :)

So you can see there's all theses cool above ground monuments, but there's no one in them like you'd expect if they were vaults. Everyone is under them. 10 to 12 feet under them. They bury 'em deep at Pere Lachaise. No clawing to the surface.

It was also the day after All Saints Day when the French decorate their graves and almost every relatively active grave was flowered, usually with mums. Even very old ones of popular historical figures got flowers, some covered in them.

Our guide told us if your loved one is being cremated, you can even wait for them to finish. Yes, you get to see the box pushed into the oven and then you wait while your loved one is flame broiled. He's even seen people handed the hot remains in an urn and then inter their loved one with oven mitts on. I'm not makin' this up (you know how the French are about fresh baked goods. No serious, i'm not makin' this up. Oven mitts.).

The more I thought about it, I really liked the idea actually. It reminded me of funeral pyres of the past and the places along the Ganges where even today you can have your dead burned on a pyre while you and other loved ones look on. Having lost a couple of people I was very close to, the closure of this would have been very reassuring to me.

The cemetary is massive. I've been in some pretty big ones. Sleepy Hollow has a huge cemetary; Meterie in New Orleans is enormous. But this is truly grand.

And hilly as hell. Our guide, Malcolm, had an encyclopedic knowledge of Pere Lachaise and at probably 60 kept us at a steady double time trot up and down hills on nasty worn cobblestone and wet slippery leaves. I definitely worked off my croissant from breakfast.

The place is truly amazing and beautiful though. Those of you who know me know I not only really love Halloween, but also graveyards; I've got a little morbid streak. The aged and sometimes falling in tombs of Pere Lachaise with the wet, dark day in a grave yard filled with cats and crows, tombs marked with owls and bats, were like a dream come true for me and I'm pretty sure I took over 200 pictures.

We saw a number of composers' tombs, lots of Napolean's generals, poets, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Seurat, and just a load of cool stuff. Our two hours or so there went by like a blink for me. I will never forget it.

Why not be familiar with places like these, I think. We'll all be spending a lot of time there.