European vacation: We visit Père Lachaise cemetery

To celebrate the promise and refreshed expectations of the new year, 2025 we took a trip to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  It’s the largest cemetery in the French capital, at 110 acres and 70,000 burial plots. It’s widely regarded as a place to go for a walk, rather than a place to contemplate the brevity of life’s brief candle-flame and indeed it is a fine place for a stroll. (Although it was raining and pretty darn cold.)

Père Lachaise cemetery

One notable aspect of Père Lachaise is its neatness. Every body has a nice rectangular plot, often a little mausoleum with a roof, a window and a place for flowers and remembrances. The grass is neatly cut and the paths laid out for walkers.  Only a few areas have the tumbledown look of Highgate (of which more later) and if it weren’t for the thick beds of moss on the horizontal stone surfaces, it would look newly built.

Rare disarray in Père Lachaise

A wide variety of people are buried here, and the one that most Americans will recognize is Jim Morrison, the singer with 60s rock band The Doors who died heartbreakingly young.  We visited that gravesite – and so did everyone else, it seems. It’s been cordoned off with tape (perhaps to keep people from trampling nearby plots) but fans have left piles of flowers and souvenirs on the stone. Perhaps ten or fifteen people visited in the short time we attended, which you can’t say about Chopin, who is also there. (Though he also has fresh flowers.)

Chopin

Jim Morrison's grave

I was delighted to visit Champollion, a giant in Egyptology and one of the pioneers in reading and understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. His tomb is marked by an obelisk, of course.  Oscar Wilde is there with a very fancy carved grave marker, sadly covered in Perspex to prevent people from leaving graffiti on the stone. The mathematician Fourier is buried there as well. The old bust that used to mark his grave had lost its nose and was widely believed to be a bust of Voldemort, so it was replaced with a new bronze bust not long ago.  His grave is also marked by an Egyptological flourish – a sun disk with two vulture wings. Paris was Egypt mad at the time. (Even more so than London.)  Another scientist buried there is Fresnel, an optics pioneer.

Oscar Wilde's marker

Oscar Wilde's marker, three quarter view

Champollion's Obelisk, Père Lachaise

Fourier's grave with verdigris bust

Fresnel's grave and headstone

I’m not sure what Miguel Asturias did to deserve a faithful copy of a Mayan stela, but it’s certainly a beautiful sight. It seems perfectly situated, a little bit of ancient Guatemalan jungle realized in Paris.

Mayan stele at Pere Lachaise

There is also a crematorium onsite with thousands of pigeonholes in a structure known as a columbarium. After a long search, we found Max Ernst’s final resting place. I guess he didn’t want a grave and a mausoleum, or indeed any fuss.  Hi Max, anyway.  

Max Ernst, in the columbarium

I picked up a conker (horse chestnut) from the grounds and I’ve put it with my conker from Golder’s Green Crematorium, which I took with me when I went to visit Marc Bolan and Paul Kossoff, many years ago.

Next: Continuing our quest to celebrate the possibilities of the brand new year, we visit Highgate Cemetery in London!

Californian's vacation: Stairs and sights in Paris

Vacation continued: 

One of the highlights of London is how easy it is to get out if and go to Paris instead.  You hop on a train at St. Pancras Station, and it deposits you at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Well, I say “hop” but due to Brexit, you do have to go through a partially-assed passport control and customs check which is a little like being a sheep herded through a sheep dip, but once that’s over you sit on the train and munch half-French British Rail-style sandwiches and try not to think about the weight of water above you in the tunnel under the English Channel (or as the French call it, La Manche).

We stayed in an out-of-the-way hotel – a suite of rooms for around $100 a night – and utilized the French equivalent of an Oyster Card, a Navigo pass.  Same deal as the Oyster Card, you fill it up at a machine and rub it against ticket  turnstiles when you want to travel.  With a London Oyster Card, you sign in and sign out at your destination. With the Navigo, you just sign in. There’s no check of where you get off the Metro. 

I found it a bit more difficult to use, in that the first time I tried, I must have waited too long to push forward, or otherwise annoyed the Transport Gods, and the green “go through” light went out. And you can’t use the card at the same gate a second time! I assume that’s their way of preventing a traveler throwing the card to an accomplice outside the gate for a second journey, but I can’t think of a reason why they need to do that.

Anyway, one of the locals, seeing me gesticulating wildly in English, let me through the gate while his own light was green. After that, things went better.

I’d never been to Paris. I’ve been across the Channel on a ferry, notably during the Royal Wedding in 1981 when I could no longer face the  overload of Union Jack bunting in London. But we only went as far as Calais, on the coast, the spiritual home of Duty-Free fags and liquor.

I think everyone has a bucket list of what they want to see in Paris, and so did we, but since we booked the trip only a few days before we traveled, we couldn’t get tickets to 95% of them. (Places like the Louvre are famously booked up months ahead, and even then are seriously overcrowded.)  

Our first trip was to the Eiffel Tower. The summit was closed, but the lower two stages were accessible by steps (or an elevator if you booked early enough, which we hadn’t). Being a Northerner, I couldn’t help measuring it up against the Blackpool Tower, but I have to say that apart from the lack of world-class ballrooms, it is impressive. We climbed the stairs to the first stage and spent an hour looking over Paris. We set out for the stairs again and I’d climbed about nine steps before declaring the second stage could look after itself and I wasn’t going a step farther. 

Lining up for the Eiffel Tower

It is a very long way up and it was cold and windy but incredibly impressive in the way all Victorian cast-iron construction is.  It was built in a couple of years for a World’s Fair, with only a 20-year permit to stay up. (Obviously, that permit was extended.) The construction speed and determination of the people of that time was something else.

Eiffel Tower from ground level beneath it

The next item on the agenda was Montmartre. As the name suggests, it’s on a mount, so that entailed another tranche of steps. The websites explain that climbing the steps is like participating in some Film Noir or WWII drama, but cities are so crowded these days that it was more like participating in one of those religious pilgrimages where seven thousand people get trampled to death because someone stopped suddenly to tie their shoelaces.  There is a funicular (an elevator/train cross) that will take you up there, but my navigator (Hi!) led us up many flights of stairs while continually telling me the funicular was just a little further on. And so it was – the top of the funicular. Google Maps had led us to the top entrance instead of the bottom.

View of Montmartre Basilica

View of Montmartre Basilica

 Since we were already at the top, there was no use crying over it, so we explored. It’s a touristy area, of course, but the Basilica was beautiful and the restaurants around retained some of their Impressionist-era charm. 

We took the funicular down.

Montmartre from the bottom of the steps

Although we had the Metro travel-card, we walked a huge distance in Paris, six or so miles a day. Things are quite far apart (compared with London, which has its major landmarks in a tiny central area) but despite the cold they were pleasant walks. The city is well-laid out, with wide streets, reasonable traffic and dotted with architecture that extols the mightiness of the French state and the citizens’ need for proportion and beauty. The non-national buildings are in the characteristic Hausmann Style. We saw the Ramses Obelisk, in much better nick than Cleopatra’s Needle in London, the Arc de Triomphe and beautiful fountains.  Oh, and the Moulin Rouge.  One surprise was the Seine, which flows rapidly. The Thames seems to mosy along slowly, and sometimes when the tide’s coming in it seems to not flow at all, but the Seine runs like a small river coming down from a mountain. (Except much wider.) It was the sort of flow you wouldn’t want to fall into unless you’re an unusually strong swimmer.

Notre Dame had just reopened after a devastating fire gutted the interior and collapsed the roof. There are still cranes and builders’ huts around it but it’s back to its glory.  It was raining when we visited, and the Griffons were spouting water on the passers-by like something from Gotham City.

Notre Dame Griffon spouting rainwater

Montmartre Griffon

Montmartre Griffon

Fountain commemorating the Smurfs

Ramses' Obelisk

Moulin Rouge from the street

Next stop on the vacation was the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Southern Californians abroad: Central London State of Mind.

 Vacation continued, still in Soho:

We toured Carnaby Street, marveling that it’s still able to trade on its name 56 years after London’s swinging creaked to a standstill. All the modern big names are there, even though Lady Jane and Biba are long gone. We didn’t buy anything. But at least it wasn’t closed.

The Coffee Store

My old not-very-happy hunting ground, Patisserie Valerie, is gone now, but the tea and coffee store a few doors down is still there. I couldn’t see any of the thick, embossed tea bricks that so excited my imagination in those days, but  you can get them on Amazon now. No need to visit the inscrutable orient, or for that matter Soho. 

We did eat pastries from Soho – I had a Mont Blanc, which is not, as I thought, a type of pen – from a patisserie nearby. Or it may have been a boulangerie. In standard Soho fashion, all three square meters of the patisserie were packed so we were sent upstairs where twenty to thirty people shrank to fit themselves around five small tables in an area no larger than my bedroom. At intervals, waiters and waitresses would appear at the top of the stairs and attempt to give random pastries to punters, who would point fingers at each other and shout out who needed what. (Each newcomer learned who had ordered which pastry from the previous round of groans and finger pointing.) It was like an Alice in Wonderland tea party, but the cakes were heavenly.

Third Man Records, London

Fender Triplecaster on Third Man stage

Pedal Board on Third Man Stage

Third Man Stage in basement

Literarium, Third Man Records, London

Also on the menu, so to speak, were Third Man Records, Jack White’s record store, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum, a must-see. It’s been expanded since I was last there. Like the zoological-taxidermy addiction of Walter Rothschild, previous post, the architectural-stone jones of John Soane was quite insatiable and the museum, which is really just a London townhouse, holds so much carved and worked stone that it must be constructed of Tardis-material with steel foundations reaching below the Tube layer.

Talking of giant stone monuments, we also (after a couple of false starts) figured out how to queue for the British Museum. This *is* a place I visited many times while I lived in London, but seeing it again was wonderful. We spent a lot of time on the Elgin Marbles. (I’d never paid any attention to them before as my parents took one of their dislikes to them.) I then spent 90% of the remainder of the time in the Egyptian Rooms, a type of pilgrimage for me.

Below: Pictures of items from the British Museum Egyptian Collection

The British Museum, unlike most I’ve visited in recent years, has not dumbed down for schoolchildren and I’m pretty sure the schoolchildren don’t mind that. (There were a lot of them around, all engrossed.) There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of items on display, with cards giving basic details and there was a complete lack of “activities,” broken machines that show videos, broken machines that show how things were made or used, or crayons, coloring books, sandboxes or play bricks.

It would take days to properly explore the museum, but we didn't have days. We did have fun.

Vacation to be continued...

England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Vacation, continued...

St. Anne's Church, Limehouse

Although I didn’t go back to the Isle of Dogs, where I once lived, we did visit Limehouse, because I wanted to visit St. Anne’s, the Hawksmoor church that is a companion to Christ Church Spitalfields. We took the legendary 277 bus, proudly tapping our Oystercards to the ticket reader as if to the manor born.

When I lived on the Island, I used to catch the 277 at Mile End. There were two kinds: one that went all the way around the Isle of Dogs and one that used to terminate half-way there, at Limehouse. I was sitting on a wall minding my own business one day when a bus came along. I got up to get on and the woman in front of me said, with extreme disdain, "Fack! Loim Arse!"

I was so taken with this inscrutable outburst that I rolled it around in my mind for a while and it wasn't until the bus terminated at Limehouse and threw us all off that I realized she had said, in East London-ese, "Oh, dear! This one only goes to Limehouse!"

St. Anne's Church, Limehouse

The bus we took this day was going around the Island, but we only went as far as Limehouse. 

I hadn’t realized St. Anne’s Church had been derelict for so long. There’s a movement to repair the roof and otherwise patch it up but it looks like it needs much more money than the few visitors a day it might get. The organ has been restored, along with the stained glass of the east window. An enthusiastic volunteer told us that there are more repairs in the works. I find it hard to believe that a country would let Hawksmoor churches melt away for lack of upkeep, but it does. (Today I heard that the government is reducing the money it spends on church upkeep, which sounds like it makes sense – the Church of England has plenty of money – but in the case of these architectural treasures, it seems churlish to let them decay.

Restored Stained Glass

Damp and water damage inside St. Anne's

St. Anne’s, Limehouse is famous – at least to me – for a mysterious monument in the churchyard. For no adequately explained reason, there’s a stone pyramid sitting in the graveyard. It’s tall and thin, the sides at the wrong angle for an Egyptian pyramid. It bears a carving, now eaten away, and the words “The Wisdom of Solomon.”  Theories abound – was it built by the Freemasons? Placed here by the Illuminati? Is there treasure underneath it? The enthusiastic guide told us it was probably part of the roof decoration that just never got hauled up there and was left dumped in the yard. He sounded like he’d had to fend off quite a few “Is it Satanist? Occult paraphernalia?” questions over the years.  I told him I remembered hearing the peacocks calling in the churchyard when I lived nearby and he looked startled, which made me doubt my own memory.

Three views of St. Anne's Pyramid

Charing Cross Road - the grate

We paid special attention to Soho. I’d always wanted to visit a particular grate in the middle of Charing Cross Road, where you can lie down and peer at a road sign several feet below ground. Little Compton Street. And so you can. I attempted to photograph it, but unlike an old-fashioned phone lens, a cellphone doesn’t fit between the bars of the grate, so the snaps are not impressive. Still, I’ve seen it now – it does exist.

Little Compton Street sign visible below street level, Charing Cross Road

 We were delighted to see that one place we remembered well was neither closed nor demolished. The Wong Kei.  It was the same as we remembered, though the waiters were at least 79% less rude than they used to be. And it didn’t take credit cards, the only place in England that didn’t. There was a cashpoint nearby, but Soho seems to have only one and this meant there was at least three hundred people in line, none of whom read English, or had brought the correct card, or remembered their password. I got fifty pounds out, realized it would not be enough and queued up again. Eventually we started our first Wong Kei meal in thirty five years. Mmm proper British (Chinese) duck! However, I’d forgotten that tax is included in the UK and tips are optional so it actually came to forty eight pounds, so hello bank I’d like my $7 in transaction fees for the second withdrawal returned, please and thank you.

Vacation to be continued...

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

 Holiday part III:

We went into London proper to recap the true London tourist experience. Both of us lived there for a decade or so in the seventies and eighties and got into that rut where you -could- go to the theater or a club or a museum every day, but since you live there you just -don’t-. We had about 24 hours over three days to rectify this situation. Luckily, they’ve invented the Oystercard, which is a credit-card sized ticket that you fill with skrilla at a machine and then rub it against ticket turnstiles on just about any form of transport. I bought fifty pounds worth of Oysters and by the end of the trip had just about spent it all. (The remainder stays in the card for the next visit, however long that may be.)

Speaking of moolah, I was very keen to find a bank or Cambio to get my hands on British money, but I was told I didn’t need it, because everyone takes credit cards from everywhere, even if you’re buying a newspaper or a bar of chocolate. This last part turned out to be true. (In the US, there’s often a ≥$5 limit on credit transactions, as no one wants to pay the fees if you’re just buying a pack of gum. Not the case in England, with only one exception on this trip.)

Our first trip took us to Central London, which was exactly the same as when we lived there thirty years ago. Oxford Street, Regent Street, Lions in Trafalgar Square, all the business. Christmas lights, conmen, fake Rolexes and people drawing huge crowds by doing “magic tricks” which had ten-minute build ups and unimpressive finales. It was absolutely rammed with people, all of whom trod on the back of my heel at one point or another. I'm short but in this crowd I was completely invisible. 

Oddly, Trafalgar Square was the least packed part of London.

We went to Foyle’s, the giant bookstore. Stephen predicted that they’d still have the same Edwardian payment system they had in our college years. In the olden days, you would find a book somewhere in the acres of dim, unmarked aisles, and take it to a counter where a young man in a three-piece suit wrote you an invoice. You then went up several floors in an elephant-powered brass birdcage elevator to a musty room in the attic where a Gringott’s Goblin behind three-inch thick bullet-proof glass read your invoice disapprovingly through tiny pince-nez, took your money in Gold Doubloons, sent the coins through pneumatic tubes to a Safe Place Elsewhere and issued a hand-written pink and yellow two-part receipt. You would then walk around for a few hours attempting to find your selected book again. On locating it, you would swap the pink receipt for the physical book. You could then take the book outside the store along with the goldenrod part of the receipt. At least, I think that’s how it went.

But Stephen was wrong. Nowadays they take credit cards at several cash registers, and you can pick up a book from a shelf that is not in semi-darkness and actually buy it. Oddly, we didn’t buy any books on our visit.  Business probably dropped off precipitously when they dismantled the old Diagon Alley system.

We visited our old university, now known as Queen Mary University of London. It is a great deal bigger than it was in our day, but since it was closed, there was no way to know if there was anything inside the new buildings. I assume there is. The People’s Palace, an entertainment venue built in Victorian Times, remains unchanged. I saw a number of terrific bands there when I was a student and I hope that tradition is continuing.

On emerging from the complex, we were startled to see that the City of London, at least the gigantic towers thereof, were far closer to Mile End than they used to be. Looming in the winter mist, they looked like a mirage of some Gernsback Continuum future, just out of reach. Mile End itself was the same – doss houses and pubs.

View of City from Mile End sidewalk

As the city has crept closer, it brought with it a little variety in the eateries, so we had handmade noodles at Biang Biang one lunchtime. Just a few yards from once-derelict Christ Church, Spitalfields and the garment sweatshops of the olden times (both still here) the eatery is in the shadow of the Gherkin.  We also climbed the Monument (to the Great Fire of London), another thing I hadn’t done while I lived there, and spent an afternoon in the Tate Modern. The Millenium footbridge was new to me, as was its startling view of St. Paul’s Cathedral (closed).

The Monument to the Great Fire of London

The Shard as seen from the Millennium Bridge

St. Paul's seen from the Millennium Bridge

The front of Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Those blasted coin-operated bicycles are everywhere.

View of Christ Church's side from the gardens,
showing the window arrangement

Two grave markers in Christ Church gardens,
now moved against a new building

I wrote a story recently that included a lot of Spitalfields' history, and has some details about Christ Church's garden and the removed graves. I was very privileged to get a chance to verify the details 'on the ground' so to speak. I did get 'creative' about the trees in the yard, but was pleased to see that they more or less correspond with what I wrote.  I used Google Street View when writing the story, an incredible resource but no match for being able to check sight lines yourself. 

More vacation to come...