Paris—Day 3: Into the Bowels of the Louvre

(n.b. French spelling is not my forte, so please disregard any typos.)

Actually, the Louvre is an amazing place (and their web site is very user friendly; the virtual tours are the bomb!). The building itself is 4 stories and too huge to get into one photo without a helicopter. It was originally a palace; we were able to see rooms that Napoleon had used, and let me tell you, it was more opulent even than the current Swedish royal family's digs. But the French aristocracy back then must have felt it was lacking, because they abandoned it for Versailles (which, from the photos I've seen, appears to be gilded from toilets to kitchen counters).

You enter through a large glass pyramid that seems a bit out of place at first, but the effect from inside is really cool. Then you go down an escalator, and the main level is one floor underground, lighted by the pyramid that now acts as an elaborate skylight. There are three wings, and each wing has four floors.

We spent !6! hours walking around and didn't even make it onto every floor of every wing. (That's as long as it took us to *drive to Paris* in the first place.) Mostly we decided what we really wanted to see, and planned it out on the handy map we got when we arrived. If they hadn't thoughtfully put numbered signs on the walls, we would have been irretrievably lost in a matter of 10 minutes.

Darling Daughter got her wish and stood before the Mona Lisa, along with the 100 people pushing us forward. Choosing not to join the teeming throng in prematurely aging the Mona Lisa via flash-photography, we declined to take our own photo. Also, we didn't know how to turn the flash off on our new-ish digital camera. But we bought a postcard and a bookmark of the M.L. later at the bookshop, so take that, Philistines!

Poor D.D. was bored out of her mind after that, and I have to admit that the thousands of paintings (even the 30-foot-high ones) kind of became a blur of colored oil after a while. L.H. dutifully looked at most of the paintings, but D.D. would find the nearest bench and flop down until we were ready to go to the next room. Then L.H. would sing a little piece from the Disney "Alice in Wonderland" to get us moving: "Clean cups, move down..."

We saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, but we missed the Egyptian section. We saw David's painting of Napoleon crowning Josephine empress, but not the medieval moat that originally surrounded the Louvre when it was a fortress. I think it would take a week just to physically walk past everything, and months to read all the labels (if we could read French; there are no multi-lingual signs on the displays in the Louvre, for future reference).

Afterwards we walked the length of the gardens, which are still being renovated, I understand, until we came out on the Champs Elysees. We walked all the way up to the Arc d'Triomphe, which is a goodly way, but it was blocked off from visitors. We're not exactly certain, but we think it was related to the next day being the anniversary of the end of WW2 in France. There was supposed to be something there on the 8th (we were there on the 7th). Anyhow, we still got to see it from fairly close, but we were all too tired and cranky by then to be properly appreciative. Thank goodness the Metro station was right there.

Yes, we managed to use the Metro and not die. Please, hold your applause. The train was no problem; finding the correct platform was the problem. After asking at the information desk (and getting half-squashed in the ticket barrier—I'm alright!), we followed the signs until we reached some tracks. And of course it wasn't the right set. How silly of us not to realize that we had to follow the platform until we were behind the original escalator we took downstairs, then take another escalator *back upstairs.* We came out in a totally different area, don't ask me how. I suspect there was some kind of time-and-space-warp into another dimension, but we made it to the Place d'Italie, so who cares how we got there.

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Each evening, L.H. would whisper, "Hey, Baby... we're in the City of Love..." To which I would respond, "And I'm the mayor of Tiredville. Sorry, Babe." Walking around for like 12 hours is only conducive to instantly falling asleep as soon as you lie down.