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Published: February 26th 2009
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Another Saturday in Paris! This time the weather was much better; there was no sign of snow. We decided to explore Les Invalides this time. First off before I talk about Les Invalides can I just say how great it is to be a student in France? I mean I’m used to getting student discounts in the US too, but I mean the discounts here are great. Last week when we went to the Catacombs it only cost 3,50 (Euros of course), which is less than going to see a movie (still a great price though at 4,10) and the ticket for Les Invalides (both Napoleon’s tomb and the army museum) was only 6,50. Maybe this isn’t as awesome to other people but I just love it.
Anyway, so we arrived at Les Invalides and thankfully the line wasn’t very long. After getting our tickets we headed over to Napoleon’s tomb first. It was very interesting, but (and I know I’m probably not the first nor will I be the last person to say this) I’m very sure Napoleon was compensating for some real/imagined shortcoming of his because his tomb is massive! After taking come photos I went to look
at letters from Napoleon to other people and not that it is very important but he had pretty decent handwriting, better than mine at least.
Once we had finished with Napoleon’s tombeau we explored the army museum. I have to say I’m not a big fan of military museums, but it was pretty interesting. I especially liked the paintings at the beginning of the museum (but that just might be because they were at the beginning). I took some photos of US gear and a US tank for my dad the army man and watched some movies about various wars that France had participated in.
Liz, Alysha and I hadn’t really decided on a place to visit other than Les Invalides but Alysha had mentioned she wanted to go to Père Lachaise so we headed over to that famous cemetery. Once there we proceeded to get very lost (next time I plan to buy a map as the place is huge). At the beginning we picked out a couple of graves that we wanted to see such as Oscar Wilde’s and Edith Piaf’s, which was in the 97th division. I think we probably walked around for at least
30 min. trying to find the 97th division. Now 30 min. isn’t bad; the bad part was that Père Lachaise is cobblestoned and walking is rather precarious there (and we were all wearing sneakers) so every other step it felt like one of us almost twisted our ankle. While looking I did get excited because I thought that we had stumbled upon Racine’s grave but was not the real Racine (or at least not the one that I wanted). After a bit we finally got to the 80’s and then what I think is the funniest thing to happen all day occurred. There was this car parked in the cemetery and a couple in front of us was walking past it when a dog jumped up to the window and scared the heebie jeebies out of the two of them. It was very droll.
Although we found the 97th division we did not see those famous burial plots. At this point we were tired form walking around all day and decided that we could always come back another day since we weren’t having any luck finding anyone famous. However on our way out thanks to a tour group we
found the grave of Apollinaire. In light of this we decided to follow the tour group discreetly, who then led us to the tombs of Balzac and Eugene Delacroix. Unfortunately some other tourists asked us if we had a map because they couldn’t locate Wilde’s tomb and we lost our tour group while talking to them. So we decided to leave.
At this point I was very tired and when I get tired I get very grouchy, so when Alysha suggested going to Sacré-Coeur I wasn’t excited. But I owe her because the view from Sacré-Coeur was most definitely worth the numbing sensation I felt in my legs after walking up all those stairs. You can see for miles and it really is amazing. It was a great way to end the day.
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