How living in Paris does it looks like?
I’ll give you a season after season answer.
I’m 21, I moved from the sunny Provence to the City of Lights aka Paris a few months ago and since, the life here is an everyday journey through history and arts. Well, and through rainy weather too, let’s admit that.
My passion is mostly photography and cinema, as I’m a photographer and a director.
This city is most likely the #1 destination for tourism, and I guess most of you have a lot of conventional ideas about this city. I had the same when I moved here. But this is a fascinating city, with as many faces as it has quarters.
Here is one of my secret spots where I go every time I need a break from the constant movement and the city’s noises.
The Père-Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris with a surface of 43 hectares. As you may know, Paris unlike New York or London doesn’t have big parks in its center. So this cemetery is the only place you can lose yourself and forget the city around. It’s located in the 20th arrondissement, on the metro line 2 (Stop Père-Lachaise). You can’t miss it.
There are many entrances for the cemetery; I love to try a new one each time I go so that I can explore a new side of it. The quietness is a must, needless to say, and even if a lot of tourists came every year, you wouldn’t be disturbed. Don’t hesitate to lose the track and wander around the forgotten tombstones. The tombs are let in their states if no one takes care of it, so you have a real feeling of decay in some parts of the cemetery considering the age of the tombstones. The time does its works on them, and for as long as you stay in this place, you will feel as if the time stopped.
Amongst the most famous people buried here, you will see Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin, Jim Morrison, many French writers like Alfred de Musset or Guillaume Appolinaire, Honoré de Balzac…
I love Chopin’s history, in particular, the way his body is buried in Paris because he loved this city and asked that his heart was sealed in a church’s wall in Warsaw. This church is one of the only buildings which wasn’t destroyed by the German air force during WW2. A lot of Polish tourists came to flourish his tomb, and you can even find a piece of a partition sometimes.