Since we were in the Louvre from 10am to about 5:30pm, I’ll just concentrate on what we saw there. Dad and I walked the few blocks from the hotel to the Louvre at 10am. We entered through the big, glass pyramid in the center. After checking our coats, we sought out the self-guided audio tours, and found that there were two different tours available. We went the classy route and chose the “non-Davinci Code” tour.
We then made a beeline for the three biggies: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Victory of Samothrace. They were all really incredible, but I don’t have much to add to the mountains of ecstatic prose that have already been written about them. I will say, though, that December seems a great time to visit the Louvre, since we didn’t encounter any of the lines I’d heard horror stories about. There was almost no line at all at the ticket counter, and even a short person who needed to get to the very front of the Mona Lisa crowd could have easily done so after about a minute of waiting.
(Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that there is a man whose full-time job it is to clap at, yell at, and shout angry French at anyone who even thinks of reaching for a camera in front of the Mona Lisa. I’ve been surprised that so many museums here do allow pictures inside, and the Louvre also allows them generally, just not in that gallery.)
So, we’d seen the Big Three and could rest easy even if the museum was evacuated that instant. Time to plan for the rest of the day…
Many guidebooks had warned us that the Louvre will punish you if you approach it with the wrong attitude. Try to see it all, and you’ll just speed along, exhausting yourself as everything blends together. At best, you’ll end up with a camera full of artwork you don’t even remember seeing! So Dad and I took it slow, spending most of the morning in the French and Italian painting wings, sitting down often, and being sure to give long stretches of attention to individual paintings as our audio guide put everything in context. Turns out that Napoleon really, really liked paintings of himself.
We then stopped for a tasty lunch in the museum café, where I had a ham and cheese sandwich and (at Dad’s recommendation) a great lemonade-beer thing (I know) called Panache (Panachet?). After lunch, Mom, Dee, and Sam showed up. We revisited our first three stops with them, and then the guys and girls split up. The boy team spent most of the afternoon on sculpture: ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and Renaissance Italian. Plenty of Michelangelo in that last gallery, and some really interesting audio commentary to boot. On the way out, we also stopped by a special tactile gallery, where they’d duplicated many of the best-known sculptures from the entire museum so that blind people – or anyone who’d been itching to touch the darn things for the last three hours – could actually feel the sculptures.
Throughout the day, we saw many tour groups going by, working in every language you can name. Guides had little microphones, and group members had earphones, which was a clever way to keep everything quiet and to prevent guides from having to yell over each other. Saw the first white person in a while who speaks Chinese far better than I do: she was a Louvre tour guide. Makes sense.
After reconvening at 4:30pm and refreshing ourselves with glasses of wine in the main Louvre café, we hopped on the metro to see the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. Amazing to see such an immediately recognizable monument sitting in the middle of a working (and busy!) intersection.
Finally, it was a rich beef + Bourdeaux dinner at a nearby French restaurant, and then the most crowded Metro ride ever back to the hotel.
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