We had an afternoon to spend in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery here in Paris. It is a remarkable city of the dead. We will be going back before we leave because 2 hours was not enough time to take some of the photographs that I wanted to take. This cemetery was founded in 1804 when the city of Paris needed more room to bury the dead. Pere Lachaise is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris. Père Lachaise Cemetery has more than 3.5 million visitors, making it the most visited cemetery in the world.
Many famous people who died in Paris are buried here. The most famous and the most visited is the tomb of Jim Morrison of the Doors.
Jim Morrison’s grave, died 1997 in Paris
Edit Piaf, famous Parisian singer
Oscar Wilde’s grave
There were many French Jewish families that were sent to German concentration camps when Germany occupied France during WWII. There are several memorials to these innocent French citizens in the graveyard. Here are a couple of them;
Memorial to the children killed by the Nazis
memorial to the people killed in concentration camps
And on a much lighter note; here is the grave of Victor Noir. He was a French journalist who is famous for the manner of his death and the sculpture that lies on top of his grave. I could not think of a good way to word this description so I will let Wikipedia do it for me.
“A life-sized bronze statue was sculpted by Jules Dalou to mark his grave, portrayed in a realistic style as though he had just fallen on the street, dropping his hat which is depicted beside him.
The sculpture has a very noticeable protuberance in Noir’s trousers. This has made it one of the most popular memorials for women to visit in the famous cemetery. Myth says that placing a flower in the upturned top hat after kissing the statue on the lips and rubbing its genital area will enhance fertility, bring a blissful sex life.” As you can see from the wearing away of the crotch area, many women have taken up the idea since he died in 1870.
Over one million people have been buried here and there are many famous French politicans, inventors and artists who are scattered among many family mausoleums. It is a cemetery that has many monuments and statues to commemorate the dead. Here are some of the more interesting photographs that I took.
And we found one live woman practicing her clarinet in the middle of the monuments. The music was enchanting.
More views of Paris to follow.
This is the house. Here are some photos of the gardens.
David is standing in one of the garden’s arches out of the rain.
And the garden flowers are exquisite. 
That tower you see in the background is a fortified tower built circa 1347 and is the only remaining part of the medieval castle that stood here. This estate has an intact donkey water wheel and well. It is a huge wooden wheel that a donkey walked in to bring up heavy buckets of water from a well that is 200 feet deep. Here is a photo of the bucket being drawn up.
This provided water for the house and the animals.
This is the formal dining room set up for a large party. 
The place settings have priceless china and gold monogrammed wine glasses. 
There were desks used by French Kings scattered throughout the drawing rooms so that guests could write letters from the mansion. 
And a lovely robin who was in the courtyard where people were eating and continued to sing as if no one was there. 
They were parking this racing boat as we were walking by. It is a stunning boat and I bet it goes fast.
They are building lots of high rise apartment ( we would say they are condos) buildings all around the marina. This one is the tallest. I can hardly image what the view is from the top stories. 
There were also a pair of swans that came up looking for food. I did not know that they lived in sea water but the harbor manager said they did.
More photographs and stories to follow soon.
They have photographs of what the inside looked like before the fire, and you can see what a precious historical house looks like now.
in case the loved one might have lost their way to their heavenly reward. There are many praying angels (perhaps for those who the living are afraid they have lost their way). 
But the one I liked the most was this giant dog on top of a monumental grave howling to the sky. Whether he is missing his master or protecting him it is hard to tell.
We paid for a tour (€10 each) and got to go into his crypt under the tower. We had an excellent tour guide Niall who told us all the stories of the National heroes who are buried in this cemetery.
This photo was taken in the O’Connell crypt. One of the creepier things was that in a room adjacent to O’Connell’s tomb, there is a pile of caskets stacked up.
These caskets belong to direct decedents of the great man who want to be buried with him. There is only one caveat, only their bodies can be stored here. No wife, child, husband or auntie allowed to be with them. I believe there are only 9 decedents who have decided to take the cemetery up on their offer. So far. And there is not much room left.
There are always fresh flowers on his grave and there is a mysterious French woman who comes every year to say a prayer and put flowers on his grave. This is what the site IrishCentral has to say about her.” A mysterious French lady will visit Michael Collins’ grave once again this year (2016) , continuing a 15-year tradition since she fell in love with the Irish revolutionary after watching the movie “Michael Collins”. She is known as the “Mysterious French Lady” and she appears like clockwork at his grave and lays them down gently before saying a prayer. The woman has been identified as Veronique Crombie, a lecturer at the French National Museum who admits to a passionate love for the Irish revolutionary.”
The Irish are very good at honoring their recent political heroes who fought so hard to secure their rights and to make their homeland a free Republic.
It is a wonderful city to visit, and we enjoyed our week there very much. This was our apartment in the student section of the city. 
We remember what it was like to be a young university student with all of those stairs. This is the city where the Claddagh ring was first made. 
David bought me one 17 years ago when we first came to Galway, and I am wearing it today. If the heart on the ring points to your body that means you are taken, if it faces away that means you are available. 
I am definitely taken.
This is the Corrib River that runs through the city and where people can fish for salmon. Most of the oldest parts of the city have been destroyed, but the Spanish arch from the 16th century that was part of the city walls is still standing. 
The people are very hardy here. We walked down to the Galway bay promenade which is in a part of the city called Salthill. There we watched some brave young people jump off the Blackrock Tower into the freezing (well, darn cold) ocean (54 degrees). 
But the young ones are not the only people to brave the cold ocean. We met Aidan and his dog Ross as he was getting ready to go out and swim in the bay. He says he does this every day, all year long, and that the water temperature does get as low as 39 degrees. He was telling us about the group of older people who do the same thing, mentioning another hardy swimmer who had halted his daily swim only a year before his death at the age of 93. I think this is how they live so long. 
The bus driver Mike told us about the landscapes and the history of this part of Ireland. We stopped for a quick break at the village of Leenane to see the start of the Killary fjord. 
Then we went on to the Kylemore Abbey. This is a lovely castle that was built on an isolated lake by a merchant named Mitchell Henry for his wife. 
She died just four years later at 45; he was heartbroken and built this Gothic mini church in her memory.
Around the 1920s, a group of Benedictine nuns who had been bombed out of Ypres, Belgium, in World War I bought the property and made it into a girls school, which they ran until declines in numbers of both teachers and students forced its closure in 2010. Now it is a romantic tourist attraction.
We hopped on the bus to catch a ferry to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. 
We went to Inishmore, the largest of the 3 Aran islands, and it is like stepping back in time. When we got off the ferry we found Tomas ( he is featured in Rick Steves’s 2004 video about the island) and his red van. There were four couples that he piled into his mini van for a 3-hour tour of the island. He took us to the end of the island to see the ruins of the seven churches. There are actually only the remains of two 8 – 13th century churches and a graveyard. 
Then he drove us to the main tourist site, Dun Aonghasa, which is a iron age ring fort at the edge of a 300 foot cliff. We had 2 hours on our own here at the fort. Tomas told us that it was a 15 minute walk up to the fort. Well, it turned out to be a 30 minute hike up hill.
When we made it through the rock doorway this is what we saw.
Or tourist natural selection, as you can see here; that is a straight drop to the ocean.
