Père Lachaise

Went to the Père Lachaise cemetery today. A few things surprised me: first, the varying levels of disrepair the graves were in.  Some were essentially new, some were old but well-preserved, some were falling apart.  There was a lot more stained glass than I'd expected, too.  It turns out that playing hide-and-seek with dead people is not that interesting to me, so I spent most of the time wandering, rather than looking for specific people.

Here is the "crematorium," which has thousands of small plaques.

Then a vast array of graves.

Here are a few that I thought were particularly lovely and/or interesting:

Another thing I didn't expect was the number of tributes about WWII.  I'm surprised it's not mentioned in more guidebooks.  I think there was a memorial for each and every concentration camp.  That was hard going.  "They broke their bodies, but never their spirits."  "Going through your memory is their only tomb."  Apparently the stones, which you can see on some of them, represent Jewish prayers.

Here you can see the backs of tombs, showing that they've been paid for, in perpetuity.

As suggested by basically everyone, I had a picnic in the cemetery for lunch.  This was my view, seated on the ground, against one of the outer walls:

Outside of the cemetery is a memorial for WWI soldiers.  This is extremely distorted-- the wall doesn't bend here-- but there was not a good way to fit it in.  It reminded me of the Vietnam War memorial, but with so many more names.