Paris 5: January 1st

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Day 4: Montmartre, Sacre-Couer, Moulin rouge, cementery piere lachaise, Dinner

January 1, 2007. The first day of the year!
We were ready to roll early (or as early as January 1st would allow), and out to our first stop of the day: Sacre-Couer. Sacre-Couer is a church on a hill in the area of Paris called Montmartre. Montmartre used to be a village outside the city full of painters and dancers and prostitutes. I think it still is, only now is not a village (haha). This is where the Moulina Rouge is, and where several parts of the movie “Amelie” took place. Anyways, getting kinda offtrack here.
We started at Sacre-Couer (sacred heart). The church is on top of a hill and you can get a great view of the city from there, but you have to pay the price: walk up a hill, and then more steps up to the church. It is on a very touristy area, and there’s people trying to sell you stuff, or to get your money. We went in the church and there was a service in progress. Mass on the 1st day of the year, in a very old church, in Paris! (with nuns in full penguin regalia singing in French!) It was awesome!. No photos inside allowed, because of the mass. Once outside, we stood in line for a bit to go to the bell tower and somewhere else inside, but after we found out it was 5 euros to get in, we ditched the bell, and went shopping!
There’s a bunch of touristy shops around the church. The kind that sell keychains and pens and that kind of souvenirs. They also had a bunch of those little French berets and I must admit I bought one! Not the cheesy kind, black with the word “paris” embedded in rhinestones. I got a very nice caramel-color mohair one. (I still haven’t worn it!).
We walked and walked around Montmartre, partly looking for Place du Tertre (where there are painters and people that draw your portrait and sell their paintings and stuff). and partly just because that’s what you’re supposed to do here. We never found the Place du Tertre, We walked until we reached the Moulin Rouge. It has a very long history, but it really doesn’t look like something extraordinary, at least not from the outside. Got a few more pictures and hopped on the metro. We had an appointment with a lizard!
Next stop was Cementery Piere-Lachaise, “the grandest address in Paris”. We got a map from a vendor outside, I had read somewhere it was worth the 2 euros, and it REALLY was. That place is HUGE! You can easily get lost in there. A French couple borrowed our map at some point, they were lost and trying to get to some tomb. We thought “You should have bought the map, dude!.” We scanned the list of famous people, and this time Gera was the navigatos. I was way too busy taking tons of pictures. I love cementeries, specially old ones. I still have to go through those pictures, I might have gotten an unexpected portrait or two… We visited several tombs, but the most memorable one was Jim Morrison’s. There was a crowd around it, so he had a fence around his tomb. The tomb itself is not spectacular or anything. I guess it is more the feeling… He had flowers and little things left by visitors, among them something we noticed right away: a bottle of tequila!
After an evening of walking among the dead, we felt pretty dead tired ourselves and headed back to the hotel for a break. After that, we just went out trying to find something to eat. We were tired of cold sandwiches, and we needed to try some authentic food. So we went to a Braserie near the hotel and ordered a bowl of French Onion Soup (in france they just call it onion soup), and escargot (snails). Gera was very surprised that I was willing to even try them! They were surprisingly delicious! With lots of olive oil and garlic, I guess they tasted like chicken! Haha