The Penn Stater Magazine

Travels with Sophie

July 10, 2010 at 2:36 am Tina Hay Leave a comment

The sepulchre of French chocolatier Emile Justin Menier at Paris' Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.

The actual Alumni Association part of our trip starts later tonight, but meanwhile I’m continuing to check out Paris on my own—and yesterday I had a chance to do some exploring with Sophie de Schaepdrijver, one of the two Penn State faculty hosts for the trip.

Sophie plans to lead interested trip participants on a walk at Père-Lachaise Cemetery on Sunday, so we did a little scouting run out there yesterday afternoon. It’s an immense cemetery with many entrances, and Sophie wanted to figure out which Metro stop was closest, which entrance would be best, etc. As for me, I just love old cemeteries with impressive sculptures, and I’ve heard Père-Lachaise is one of the best. Plus, I wanted to see the famous graves: Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf.

As it turns out, we did not actually see any of those graves. Did I mention how immense the cemetery is? It was staggeringly immense, and we had only about 90 minutes to explore before the gates closed. (And when they close the gates, they get very aggressive about getting you out of there, ringing a loud handbell and calling to you, “Mesdames, mesdames!”) But we saw quite a bit in 90 minutes. Gorgeous sculpture. Lots of busts of famous French people. The graves of people whose names I recognized (e.g., Colette) and many I did not.

But that’s the thing about hanging out with Sophie in Paris: She knows all this stuff. She grew up in Belgium, and she studies history for a living, so we’d see a grave of someone I never heard of and she’d say, “Oh, so-and-so! He was a French poet” or “She was a suffragist” or “My favorite novelist!”

Pave d'espadon a la vinaigrette de rauque et passion: it's what's for dinner.

Afterward, we used the Yelp app on my iPhone to find a restaurant nearby. Interestingly, the iPhone sensed my location as being in Paris, so the restaurant reviews were in French—thus I had to hand the iPhone to Sophie so she could translate the reviews. We picked a place called Aux Petits Oignons (the little onions) and had a great meal there.

You can see the menu in the photo here (click on it to see it bigger), and if your French is as bad as mine, you’ll understand how lost I would have been without Sophie there to translate. I had the
pave d’espadon a la vinaigrette de rauque et passion, which was swordfish with yellow and red peppers, some sort of orange pumpkin- or yam-like thing, and a fruity salsa. It was great!

After that, Sophie persuaded me that we should walk part of the way back to the hotel, rather than taking the Metro the whole way. She and one of our local trip directors both said that the best way to experience Paris is to walk it. So we walked all the way down to Place de la Nation, which I later calculated on Google Maps to be about three kilometers (not quite two miles).

And I’m glad we did, because if we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen Place de la Nation—a huge plaza with a huge sculpture by Jules Dalou called Triumph of the Republic. Very impressively lit at night.

I’ll post photos from yesterday’s adventures later today on the magazine’s Facebook page.

Tina Hay, editor

NEXT: Lots of Photos from Paris

Entry filed under: Alumni Association. Tags: Aux Petits Oignons, Jules Dalou, Paris, Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, Place de la Nation, Sophie de Schaepdrijver, Triumph of the Republic.