Paris II

Me in front of the famous pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre

On Sunday we woke up and Brittney said she had to do some homework and would just stay home while I went to the Musee du Louvre or the Louvre to us. She walked me there, about fifteen minutes, and asked if I could get back. My palms always start sweating when I do anything new on my own. I paid and started wondering around. I was on a somewhat limited time schedule considering the Louvre could be done in days and I had plans to meet back up with Brittney that afternoon. I prioritized and decided first I needed to see the Mona Lisa just to say I did. First I was in the sculpture area. There were about 200 sculptures made out of that white stone or mable and they were just so steriotypical. I saw Venus and you are thinking that she's really cool when she's in books and you can see why it's such a famous sculpture. But then when you see it next to hundreds of other sculptures and they all look the same, you are wondering who picked that one and told everyone that that was the best? So, I was already bored. I think of art as boring old paintings of people's faces, naked mothers with fat, angelic looking children, and then the white sculptures. I wanted to see something different. And I had already seen on the map that they had African, Greek, Egyptian, and Iranian art so I was eager to get to these places. I pretended to be intelligent, stopping to peer at paintings occasionally on my way to the Mona Lisa.

I finally found it and I knew I was there because there were a crowd of about 200 people and they were all jumping up and down trying to take pictures over people's heads. I thought Elvis had come back to life or something. The closest I could get to the picture was about 200 feet away because of the crowd. There were armed guards and the picture is under about two feet of glass. The darn thing is only a footxfoot painting. I thought it would be bigger. I was sad that I had searched all this time to find it. I thought I would just quickly skim through the rest of the French/Italian paintings.

I found some that I really liked called Large Scale French Paintings. These were about thirty foot by thirty foot paintings. Many of them were like crowds of people as opposed to the smaller ones which are usually just one or two people up close. They depicted scenes, there were battle scenes, the coronation or some queen and all the people in the background, and people at balls. These were the only paintings I liked. I loved that if you looked hard enough, there were always one or two people in the background with something funny, either a funny look on their face, or in one instance, a couple was making out behind a curtain, which you could see you looked hard enough. I liked that the artists depicted the side characters as well, besides just the rich person who comissioned the painting.

I'm still really upset my camera erased the pictures. While all the signs in the huge lobby were in French, English, Spanish, and an Arabic Language, all the little faceplates with the paintings' names and descriptions were solely in French. So I took a lot of photos of the artwork and the paintings and I was going to come home and research them. My French history isn't great, so when I was looking at the "Objects of Art" which was basically like things obtained from the houses of royalty, I didn't know most of the royalty. Seeing their things, plates in gold, rich fabrics, and crystals, made me want to know more about them.

They also had Egyptian art. It was exactly as you'd expect. All the statues, sculptures, and coffins had a head with long hair and that striped headpiece they wore. The Greek stuff was cool. It was really old. They had six rooms of just terracotta, pots with pictures on them. The pictures were made of some kind of black stone. No joke, they looked like the pots on the cartoon movie Hercules that the narrative women jump off of. There were also tablets with Greek writing and a bunch of tiny figurines. The Iran/Iraq/Mesopotamia area I thought would be the most entertaining, however, it was the area with the oldest stuff and much of it was only partially intact.

I moved then to Napoleon III's apartments. This was ridiculous. My first impression was new money/tacky. It showed what "great wealth" meant at the time. Everything was plated in gold, including the walls, crushed red velvet was everywhere with gold thread. Everything was big. Huge chandeliers, oversized furniture, gold threaded carpet, murals on the wall, pull cords to signal attendants. I can't get over how red everything was. A friend was able to put it in perspective though, we see certain things as a show of wealth not because they are necessarily more becoming than items regular people have, but because they are hard to get or expensive to buy. This is probably Napoleon's philosophy. That was amazing because they had recreated the apartments with every aspect including his wallpaper, light fixtures, staircases, rugs and flooring, furniture, dishes, fireplaces, everything. The African exhibit was closed.

I'm sure I missed explaining so much, but it just made me feel more intelligent, like I'd experienced a little piece of history by seeing these things. I only wish I knew more about them! I made my way back to Brittney's, once again beaming because I'd gotten back by myself. We went and walked around Luxembourg Gardens, kinda like the Central Park of Paris. Interesting fact: children have to pay to use play equipment at parks. The swings are in tiny stalls, small enough that the parent must stand outside the stall and push their kids. The set of stalls is surrounded by a locked fence, you have to go through the pay booth to get in. There was also a complete playground, you had to pay to enter that as well. I decided that it would cut down on pedophiles and people snatching kids, because you can only leave with the child you came with and no creepy, lurkers can just enter because the whole thing is surrounded by twenty foot fencing and has a net roof over the top. I was shocked. Everyone, rich or poor, should be able to take their children to the park.

After getting used to people driving on the wrong side of the car and road, I go to Paris to find that they drive like American's and I almost got killed. We walked around some more. We stopped for lunch at this place where I got a foot-long hotdog in a baguette. I had something similar in Amsterdam. This is quickly becoming my new favorite food. We watched the sun set over the Eiffel Tower in another park as we sat by a fountain, where they had chairs for people to use that weren't chained to the ground. In the US, those chairs would have been gone in a day!

That night we decided to go out to a nice dinner. We were walking along looking at menu's and this guy ran out of the restaurant and promised us free wine if we came in. We decided to eat there because you could get an appetizer and entree for relatively cheap. I wanted to repay Brittney in some way for letting me crash at her house for four days and taking the time to introduce me to her friends and show me all around Paris. Our waiter was out of control. At one point we asked him to take a picture of us, and he took the camera and held it two feet away from Brittney's face. We were like no, of both of us! He spoke every language too. Everything someone was outside the door he would drop what he was doing, leave candles blowing out and dishes crashing in his wake as he raced out of the restaurant to personally persuade people to come in. They would say, "hablo espanol" and he was like "oh, hola, como estas?" We told him, "Sorry we only speak English" he was like "oh, come in come in." He also spoke French and who knows what else. The waitor made our night. I realized why he was so outgoing too, he finished two bottles of wine while we were there. He was drinking under the counter!

I got the French Onion Soup and for my main meal potatoes and steak. We were at dinner for at least three hours. That's how European countries are though, you don't just go in to eat, they are very slow at bringing your food on purpose so you have time to converse. We decided to go big since we both admitted neither of us really eats out. We ordered the chocolate fondue with fruit. It was amazing. We left the restaurant at 11:30 pm, that place was packed and people were still coming. They eat dinner late. We walked, more wobbled actually, back to Brittney's place and went to bed.

I got up really early the next morning since my flight was at 9am. I thanked Brittney and she showed me to the train. I took the train to the airport, plane to Luton, UK, then took a bus from there back to school. I still had class an hour after I got back. I was exhausted and slept the rest of the day. What a whirlwind vacation!