Where the $#!& is it?

By the end of my time in Paris, I had been exploring the city's streets for a little over two weeks. Now I feel pretty confident in my abilities to navigate the hodgepodge of streets. So confident in fact, that I avoided pulling out my map for the entire last week! Unfortunately, this definitely was not the case when I first landed in Paris...

The very first day, we were pretty exhausted, but I was still determined to see at least one landmark. So we took the small trek down to the Arc de Triomphe. When we turned down a major street, I just stared at my map in confusion. I was pretty sure the giant monument should have been visible from where we stood. It took a few extra minutes for my dad to stop laughing at me long enough to point out that I had been looking right past it the entire time. Laughing it off as a rookie mistake, we continued. 

But apparently, the iconic monuments of Paris enjoyed hiding from me. Sitting underneath the Arc, I again looked at my map, this time contemplating why I couldn't spot the Eiffel Tower. I even started turning in circles and counting streets to find the right direction. And again, my dad just laughed at me until I saw it, very clearly looming over the city's low skyline.

From that point on I made sure to always be aware of the tower, but my struggles were not over. Thankfully, my dad finally joined me in oblivion. On the day we visited Montmartre (the highest point of Paris), we decided to walk through the cemetery. It was a beautiful day and every grave was unique and extravagant. 

When we looked at the visitor's map I noticed that my favorite painter, Edgar Degas, was buried somewhere in the maze of stones. We decided to head in that general direction in the hopes that it would be obvious enough that we could spot it. On the way, we were amazed by the impressive headstones and the people lying underneath them. We saw the graves of people like Hector Berlioz, Adolphe Sax, and some physicist that my dad got really excited about. But we were nearing the end of our route and had still not seen Degas. Now, the thing I had forgotten about the French is that any name starting with "De" is actually meant to be separated from the rest. So when my dad and I stopped to snicker immaturely at the poor fellow whose last name was "de Gas," we had no idea it was actually the exact grave we were desperate to find. Instead, we both took pictures of the neighboring graves for no particular reason:

Here lies someone random

We ended up walking all the way back to the entrance to take a picture of the map that we could follow better. When it took us to the exact spot we had stood at, it still took us a minute to comprehend how much of a difference the spacing and capitalization can make in a name. It even has an image of himself and his signature on the front..

Even if I had a little trouble at first, I eventually got to see everything I set out to find in Paris. It was a spectacular trip with spectacular sights.