Lost in Montmartre

I meant to post this on Wednesday…

As part of my rather feeble preparation for my semester here, I read Matt Gross’ recent article “Lost in Paris” ((http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/travel/lost-in-paris.html?pagewanted=1) and found it particularly exciting—the prospect of finding new incarnations of Paris after years seems so beautiful. One of the things Gross “rediscovered” in Paris in this article was Montmartre, the quarter with mega tourist attractions like the Moulin Rouge, the Sacre Coeur, and it’s where the movie Amelie was filmed. Gross’ descriptions of the wonderful, peaceful side to the sometimes gaudy neighborhood sounded amazing, so I was happy to find that an NYU professor was giving a “ghost tour” of the neighborhood and that some of my friends wanted to go.

I had a meeting with a different professor when the tour began to start, but since I was in a nearby area a few days before, I didn’t think I’d have a problem taking the metro alone and meeting up with the group a bit late--and if I didn’t find them, there are a ton of cute cafes I wouldn’t have minded hanging out in. But when I got off the metro, a friend said they were in the cemetery, the very location that Gross mentioned in his article as being one of the forgotten, lovely spots tourists sometimes miss (I guess the first choice cemetery is Père Lachaise, where Jim Morrison is buried, probably). I was excited to join the group, and I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find.

I was wrong.

Usually I’m pretty good at following a map, but one of the things about Paris is street signs are hard to find if they are marked at all. Wandering onto a random side street (I thought it was the Blvd. Place de Clichy?), I was wary of even opening my map because I was already getting weird looks from the groups of youngish guys standing around. I had forgotten what the Moulin Rouge, you know, actually was, and maybe I just looked out of place (do French women not chew gum?). But the street was pretty deserted, and what I thought was the cemetery gate was just the gate to a really depressing looking mansion. It was stressful. So I turned around, started following an assertive-looking lady, trying to look equally as assertive, and finally found a sign to the cemetery and followed it.

As I walked into the cemetery, famous for housing the remains of Alexandre Dumas and a lot of other people I’ve never heard of, I realized this was the first time I had really walked around the city alone. One of the things I had expected in Paris was to be spending some time alone exploring, before I made friends to join me, but that just hasn’t been the case at all. Walking into the cemetery alone was weird (even weirder were the crow’s calls, which I haven’t heard anywhere else in Paris and felt deliberately spaced like in a Hitchcock movie, and the black cat that I saw just after walking in), but it was also kind if great; I’m not sure if there is a better feeling than finding something that you were looking for by yourself, even when something is an overlooked cemetery filled with geniuses. It’s also great to finally meet up with the group just in time to follow them to other dead geniuses’ (Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec) old, beautiful apartments.