Père Lachaise Cimetiere / Paris Catacombs

I went to see the Père Lachaise Cemetery one weekend before heading over to the apartment of some of the other interns for some wine, baguette, jambon, and good company. They lived nearby, but I totally underestimated the vastness of the cemetery and ended up arriving almost an hour after I had planned. 

Because of its scale and also the large house-like tomb structures, the place feels a bit like a little town for the dead. There's also an impressive list of 70 famous that are buried here. A few that I recognized included Balzac, Bellini, Bizet, Bugatti, Chopin, Delacroix, Haussman, La Fontaine, Moliere, Pissaro, Proust, Rossini, Seurat, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Associated with some of these are traditions upon visiting the graves. Flowers for Chopin, subway tickets, joints for Morrison... 

I've always had a strange love for cemeteries. Love walking through them, reading the epitaphs, looking at the dates. Many of them are also incredibly beautiful sites (like the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston), or just meditative and calm, places for memories. 

In contrast to this is the Parisian catacombs. To get there, one walks through a non-descript door off a street in southern Paris, descends down so many stairs I almost began to think the stairwell didn't have an end (19m), and walks through the tunnels of the old limestone quarry. Here the bones of thousands of Parisians are deposited from graveyards around the city that were becoming too crowded and also unsanitary for the city's well water. The bones are actually stacked in quite an aesthetic manner, and the 45 minute walk through tunnels of bones stacked shoulder high on both sides surprisingly negates any feelings of disgust, replacing them with spectacle. (Quite dehumanizing).