For our third day in Paris, we decided to tackle the Louvre—the largest museum in the world (so they say). The Louvre is pretty intimidating. I think you can go there all day everyday for a month and still not see everything. Fortunately, we had our good friend, Rick Steves, with us, so we had a plan. In his Paris book, Rick has self-guided tours of several museums and the Louvre is among them. I had used some of his self-guided tours before, out of a book called Mona Winks. He has written these tours with the help of an art historian, so for each piece, there is an explanation of what it is and why it’s important and what you ought to be looking at, which is very helpful for a couple of science geeks such as John and me.
We started off the day with breakfast at Café du Marche on Rue Cler (two croissants, tea au lait, and orange juice), then headed off to the Louvre. We had bought a museum pass the day before (a consecutive day pass which can save time and money) so we were supposed to be able to go in a special entrance instead of waiting in line, but that entrance was closed, so we had to wait in line anyway. Fortunately, the line is not very long. To get into the Louvre, you have to go through a metal detector and have your bag x-rayed. This isn’t increased security due to terrorism—it was like this when I visited in 1999. I think it may have something to do with the fact that Mona Lisa has been stolen several times throughout Louvre history. Anyway, our first stop was to look at ancient and classical Greek and Roman sculptures including Venus de Milo and Winged Victory. Then, we dabbled in a bit of Italian renaissance (including my favorite painter—Andrea Mantegna) stopping briefly at the Mona Lisa (there are so many people around the Mona Lisa, and the painting is really portrait-sized [many people say they expected it to be larger] so it’s kinda hard to get a real good look at it and ponder why it’s so popular) and after that we were so tired, we decided to have a bit of lunch at a café.
Then we went to see the French romanticists, a small foray into renaissance sculpture, then finally, a trip through Middle Eastern art, mostly from Iraq. I hadn’t seen these pieces before, so I was more excited about them. We saw the Code of Hammurabi, which is inscribed on a gigantic black stone pillar in cuneiform (a set of laws). That Hammurabi, he was a real stickler for rules. Some of the highlights: a couple caught in adultery shall have their hands tied together and thrown in the river, a surgeon convicted of malpractice shall have his hand cut off, and if your goat grazes on another man’s land you owe that man 20 gur of grain. Very fair, that man. We also saw a giant wall carving of Gilgamesh who John calls a girlie-man because he was holding a kitty (a lion really), and he had flowers on his dress (toga, tunic, whatever you call it). We also saw a few panels depicting The Cedars of Lebanon (transporting cedar logs down a river). Cedars of Lebanon is a restaurant in Hyde Park so we had to have a picture of that one.
Finally, I dragged John through Napoleon III’s private chambers to see the pretty furniture, and then we searched all over to find Napoleon I’s crown jewels, and then we decided we’d seen enough, so we headed back to the hotel for a nap.
After napping, we went for dinner at Café Bosquet, a restaurant in the Rue Cler neighborhood. Very good food at a good price. Then, we headed off to see the Arc de Triomphe. By now, it was dark, but that was okay—you can go to the top of the Arc until 11pm.
The Arc is in the middle of a huge, messy rotary (roundabout—whatever you call it). Strangely, cars entering the rotary have the right away. Apparently, there are so many accidents there each year, that the insurance companies split the fault 50/50 for all accidents in that rotary. Fortunately, there’s a pedestrian underpass so we didn’t have to worry about the traffic situation. After wandering around the base for awhile, we decide to climb to the top—no elevator, you have to take stairs. I thought I remembered that it was something like 100 steps. It was actually 280 steps. We were dying by the time we got to the museum which is almost at the top. We stopped there to rest for a minute, then continued our climb. At the top, we stared out at the city of lights. It’s really quite pretty at night. We could see down the streets and the Eiffel Tower. John took several pictures of the street we thought was the Champs Elysee and of the Tower (I’m glad I’m not the only one obsessed with it), then the batteries in the camera died and we didn’t have any spares. Which would’ve been okay, but the street we had been taking pictures of was actually Grand Armee and Champs Elysee was on the other side of the Arc. We tried to make our camera take one last picture, but it had had enough.
After leaving the Arc, we strolled down the Champs Elysee looking in the windows of the expensive stores and popping into a Mercedes showroom to admire a lovely little convertible. We tried to ignore the McDonald’s (they really are everywhere). Then, we headed back to our hotel. When we were exiting the subway station, we heard all of this shouting and noise and the occasional siren. It sounded like a riot. Turned out it was one of those crazy bicycle rallies where hundreds of bicyclists take to the streets and force cars to maneuver around them for a change. We’ve seen this in Chicago and heard about it happening in New York, but never did we expect to see it in Paris. The sirens were from the police who were riding along with them.
And so ends another wonderful day in Paris.
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