I’m no seasoned traveler by any means, but I’m starting to collect bits of wisdom from trip to trip. This week I’d love to share a few of the tips I gathered during my short visit in Paris.

This looks like one angry lady, ready to fight. Sculpture on one of the sides of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris.

The audio output on Alex’s seat didn’t work on our flight back home… 9 hours without entertainment can be really dull and we were not happy about the situation. We politely complained to the flight attendants – and while I can’t say they were quick to help us – we finally got coupons allowing us to claim a compensation on United’s website. That’s just normal service, I guess everyone would have done the same and expected a little something as compensation.

Without this incident however, we would have miss on a much bigger reward.

There was some serious turbulence – really serious, it felt like falling off a few floors in an elevator – during the same flight. We didn’t complain about that because we consider it’s not the airline’s fault but apparently some people were so distressed by it that the airline decided to issue a compensation of 9000 miles or 100$ vouchers for every passengers on the flight. They didn’t mention it anywhere, didn’t send an email – nothing. It’s only by visiting united.com/appreciation to file in our other complain that we were informed of this offer.

Between this and our audio problem, we have our flights for Comic-Con all paid for! (If we can manage to find a damn hotel… but that’s another story.)

Moral of the story, find the customer appreciation page for the airline you use and don’t hesitate to file complains or check for offers if you think a situation calls for it. You never know…

Enclosed by stone walls, the cemetery looks like a city inside a city. On the recommendation of a friend, I buy a map of the place and we make our way through the gates. We follow the winding paths stretching among the elaborate tombs scattered tightly over the rolling hills. It takes a while to shake off the group of loud students that entered with us, but somewhere between two wrong-turns and a dead-end, we finally get to be alone – us and the hundreds of crows watching over the cemetery. There are trees everywhere, but since it’s still winter, their bare branches can’t entirely hide the big city around us. In summer, the feeling must be totally different with the green canopy acting as a protective bubble over the cemetery.

The most common grave are about the size and shape of a phone booth. I’m sure there’s a Doctor Who joke to be made with that but I leave that to you…

It’s kind of fun to look for our first famous tombstone – like a treasure hunt. The map isn’t super precise, so there’s some guess-work to find the correct lot and then we have to look for the tomb location. We visit Rossini, Chopin, Poulenc. At Jim Morrison’s grave, I start second guessing the interest of our hunt. I’m not very emotional and I get absolutely no kicks from visiting celebrities’ resting places.

Morrison’s grave is quite unimpressive, if not for the ridiculous amount of mementos cluttering it: letters, pictures, flowers. And a sealed pack of cigarets strategically placed somewhere in the midst of it. A metal fence – the kind they use in outdoor concert – prevents anyone from getting near. It doesn’t stop most visitors but for the rest, a tree nearby seems to offer a great alternative. I try not to be judgmental but trees are a weakness of mine…

After some random wandering, we found our way to the flat part of the cemetery. I mean this literally – there’s no more hills on this side – and figuratively – the paths are straight and square, a bit dull in fact. We still look around to find Oscar Wilde’s grave. It’s not very pretty and moreover, it’s surrounded by a plexiglass fence that sucks out all the charm of being in 200 years old cemetery. Bleh. Moving on.

We decide to stroll the cemetery randomly, hunting for picture opportunities instead of famous tombstones. The Père Lachaise cemetery is a fantastic museum of funerary art and there are some gems to be found among the ancient sepulchers of rich (I assume) unknown (to me) French men and women.

There are still people being buried or cremated here, and we cross a few cars trying to find their way in the tiny alleys of the cemetery to attend a funeral. It’s easy to get lost and then you have to continue forward, since u-turns are practically impossible to make. I would rather die than drive here ;)

There’s a funeral or something at the columbarium when we arrive, so we try to be discreet and not linger around for too long. It’s weird to mix tourism and grief, but I guess the people who choose to be buried at Père Lachaise aren’t averse to that kind of attention. It’s the world’s most visited cemetery, after all.

A few hours in, our feet are killing us (pun intended), so we decide to head back to the hotel. But not before stopping for our last dinner in Paris… in a Chinese restaurant ;)

The columbarium. I love that word. Columbarium.

With the right light, that huge iron tower seems to be made of fine lace.

Guessed which camp I’m in? Yeah, of course I climbed the stairs – and it probably was a good thing too, considering all the pastries and fries I’d had since our arrival ;)

Making it to the first floor wasn’t too hard. Except for the wave of vertigo that would take me when I’d start thinking too much about the structure I was in, I climbed the 328 steps like a real SF girl who’ve seen worst (San Francisco is a big stair fest). I was happy with myself and perfectly content to stay at this level, but Alex had other plans… He didn’t exactly tell me that while we were waiting in line to get in, but since he had already climbed the first floor on a previous visit, this time he wanted to go all the way up.

What good girlfriend could deny that to the man who had made this whole trip possible? Not that girlfriend… even if vertigo gave her butterflies well intent on eating her guts. My politic about vertigo is to never let it prevent me of doing something I really want to do – the problem is that sometime I don’t really want to do something that scares me, you know.

Here’s the step counts for the first and second floor 9_9

How very steampunk-looking, isn’t it?

I sucked it up – as well as the tiredness from climbing the stairs – and we made it to the 2nd floor. Is the view on the 2nd floor worth the 341 steps difference? Not really. At this distance, high is high, and a couple of meters more doesn’t have such a big impact on the view. It is, however, a necessary step to go to the 3rd and last floor… and if you go half way, there’s no reason not to go all the way…

A tilt shift effect and suddenly Paris looks like a doll’s playground…

It’s funny to look at Paris from above. There’s no really marked skyline, like many other city of this size would have. Except for the Montparnasse tower (the black building that looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in the picture below) and a small cluster in La Défense (the business district), there’s no skyscraper in Paris. You can see the city spread really far and it’s easy to recognize landmarks even from the lower floor. Everything looks so small, and since it’s pretty and very detailed, it kind of looks like the scale model of a fictional city designed by a mad civil engineer and his megalomaniac architect friend. The streets scatters like a web-shaped maze and there’s just so many beautiful buildings to look at.

The last floor is accessible through elevator only – relief! – and it is the most rewarding. The lift ride is very smooth and slow, but it doesn’t make it less scary. It climbs for 1 minute 40 seconds (if Wikipedia is right) during which I was sandwiched between a glass wall, my husband and the back of another tourist (it was a club sandwich). Now, the difference between the 2nd and 3rd floor is totally worth the extra 5 euros we had to pay to get there. I couldn’t find the exact number, but from the pictures, I can deduce it’s about 2 times as high as the previous floor, which changes the view quite a bit. If you’re too afraid or the wind bothers you, it’s possible to look out from the cabin where the elevator brings you.

It’s worth it to get out though. And not just because the view is better outside than through the blurry windows of the cabin…

That’s right… there’s champagne at the top! Of course, it’ll set you back 10 euros a glass, but then… you’re worth it – you just climbed 669 steps!

After a crazy photo shoot session with the champagne flutes (gotta get 20 euros of pictures out of them!), we made a toast for real: to being together, wherever that is.

And then we proceeded to climb down the 669 freakin’ steps -_-