Day 16 - Expectations

Today was monopolized by the Louve. After breakfasting and cleaning up, we immediately set out for the Louve which turned out to be our sole destination for the day. I’m not even sure what to say about the Louve; our experience with it was that after an unknown number of hours we were exhausted with looking at art, but there were stages that may help to illustrate how we felt about it. First, we were very impressed with the size and the works and the layout...basically everything. After a few hours our thoughts, which you would catch once and while and would chuckle to yourself about, turned into, “Oh, that’s just another Rembrandt; And there’s some more painting from the 14th century; Ok, another room of paintings that are more than 50 feet long.” The size is equally as unbelievable. I promised myself that I would at least notice each work that I encountered without just walking by in order to get to a different room, but that was impossible. There is way, WAY too much to see in any one day. I’m positive that even with our brisk pace and eventually disregard for rooms that didn’t have the most notable works, we still maybe walked through a third of the museum. The most notable part of the day was when we realized that we only had an hour left and decided to see the Mona Lisa. It was ridiculous. The crowd, which was bearable all day long, steadily thickens to an annoying, impolite climax around the Mona Lisa. The painting is, after looking at paintings all day long, unremarkable and there are hundreds of people crowded around it taking pictures of it with a sea of multicolored hair as the foreground. It is absurd and wondered if “the most famous painting” was just a title created to keep most of the Louve’s crowd contained in a small area. After the Louve, where we walked around until well after closing when they barricaded us toward the exit, we went to the south of Paris in hopes of visiting the catacombs so instead settled for a photo tour of the “Rue de la Sexy.” Here we found no exciting postcards. The French take their sexy stores pretty seriously it turns out, and have no time for novelty items.