My first suggestion - learn from our mistake. Don't walk. Take a taxi or public transportation. It was a long walk, 2.5 miles, from our hotel near the Pantheon. It wasn't a bad walk, but the neighborhoods were not particularly scenic. It was nice to see some of the neighborhoods outside of the tourist center of Paris. And, for that matter, it didn't take too much longer than public transportation. It took us around 45 minutes to walk it. The shortest public transit route took 31 minutes (according to Google Maps) and required a transfer. But if you do decide to walk, remember - when you get there, all you're going to be doing is walking around some more.
My wife had a list of graves she wanted to find. We had a map that we'd accessed on the internet, and there are detailed maps in the cemetery. But still, it's not easy to find specific graves. As we began exploring the winding paths through the cemetery, one of the first things we came across was the Jewish section. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but even in death the Jews of old Paris were segregated in a Ghetto. There is a Rothschild family vault, but we couldn't find it. (Later on during our visit, we did find newer Jewish graves in other parts of the cemetery.)
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| Chopin's grave in Paris - pilgrimage for a piano player |
We did find the graves of Jim Morrison and Frederick Chopin. We looked for others, including Gertrude Stein and Edith Piaf. But we just couldn't find them. We came across the tomb of Honore de Balzac, though we weren't really looking for it.
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| Jim Morrison's grave - pilgrimage for Doors fans |
For me, the thing that made our visit memorable was a series of very moving monuments to the victims of World War II and the Nazis. Besides several monuments to French Jews who were murdered in various concentration camps, there also were memorials to French soldiers and resistance fighters who died in the war.
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| Monuments to those sent to Sachsenhausen (left) and Buchenwald (right) |
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