Some Go to the Louvre. I Hit the Crypts.

   The Cemetery of Montparnasse, Paris

More Images from Above and Below Montparnasse, Paris

I would rather experience history in a more tangible way than being kept at a distance from a painting, separated by red velvet ropes and bullet-proofed glass. Although, nothing says "fabulous" like red velvet ropes.... 

That said, I spent three days above and below Paris. The people interred there and their stories are profound. Some were innocents who were exhumed from the old cemeteries and dumped "placed" in the quarries to make room for the newly deceased. Others, directly above ground in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, were more fortunate, more privileged, and without question, more respected. Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Samuel Beckett (1906–1989),Brassaï (1899–1984), Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), Susan Sontag (1933–2004), and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) & Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).

Jetlag, Tripping in the Catacombs of Paris, and Beyond...

Catacombs of Paris

The cool thing about jetlag........is that it distorts your reality and your sense of time and space. It's like tripping without the use of Psychedelics.

The advantage is that when you wake up on your first day of your arrival you are up waaaaaaaaaaay ahead of everyone else. This is ok though because you want to get up and get out there right? The only issue that I personally created on my first morning in a Paris hotel was setting off the smoke alarm from the shower steam. At 5am. Je suis tres désolé, Neighbors….. This was nothing really –compared to burning a hole in the carpet of my Athens hotel room several years ago the first morning with my American curling iron via miss-matched electrical adapter. That was very different. I tend not to be an ambient personality. On occasion, I've blazed a trail -or two.

That said,  my trip to France in September 2010 was to celebrate making it to 45.  What I originally booked as a two week vacation in and around Paris evolved into a 20-day journey via plane, train, car, taxi with ambitious drivers, and ferry starting in Paris, then to Nice, Cannes, and ultimately to Corsica, L'Île de Beauté.  It was an exceptional personal journey. And, having thrived and survived it...never to be the same, I decided to go back this September to Nice for a couple of days and then to Corsica for three weeks. But, first....a recap of last year's trip down the rabbit hole -starting with the descent down to the Catacombs of Montparnasse. 

The Descent...

Montparnasse Catacombs Via "Ghost Village"

Since Paris is rich with history I thought it best to start with checking out Her dead. And, there are a lot of them. So many by the late 1700's that the cemeteries were overflowing with victims of the black plague, wars dating back to the Middle Ages, starvation,etc.... Due to the fact that Parisians were incapable of folding time and space and disease was spreading rampantly they decided to exhume the bodies and transfer them into the quarries. Ultimately a sound argument for cremation. (But, I still won't do it.) More than 6 millions Parisians were transferred into what would become the biggest necropolis in the world. It gets more cryptic and involves "sculpture".