So that La Giaconda will be the thumbnail of the post.
I mean, isn't she THE reason why people come to Paris? Of course not, but the madness around this painting is hilarious.
And I'm going to commit heresy, right up front: I liked the Musee D'Orsay WAY better than the Louvre. Way, way better.
Anyway, this morning before we headed to the Louvre, we went grocery shopping. Our first attempt had us at a market called "Picard" (yes, I said, "Jean Luc?"). On google maps, it had self-identified as a "super market". But the Picard market was very odd - all it had was frozen products. That's it. If it can be frozen, they had it. Not a single fresh item in sight.
So we went back to the hotel and just asked the front desk. They have been unbelievably helpful this entire time so far. The front desk guy showed us another market on them map. When we got there, this market looked like something we were more familiar with and we got back to the hotel with breakfast items and on our way by about 11:00 a.m.
We had heard from several sources that there is an "alternate" entrance to the Louvre that has no line. We couldn't find it. But we did have our 4-day Paris museum pass that allowed us to bypass the long line and walk right into the museum. Easy-peasy.
The glass pyramid that covers the main entrance acts as a lovely greenhouse - it was really warm in the lobby. And it also felt like the entire population of Paris was in that museum, which didn't make things any better.
We decided to bypass the Mona Lisa for a while. We went up to the section with 16th, 17th and 18th century painters from all over Europe. Saw some painters I'd never heard of, some very familiar names (Rembrandt and Reubens), and refreshed memories of at least one I had totally forgotten about until I saw his paintings of ginormous trees and teeny people (Russeau).
One thing about the Louvre: it has a LOT OF STUFF. Back on Sunday, the segway tour-guy had said that it would take 12 full days for someone to look at each item for 30 seconds. Well we have a solution for that - we didn't look at hardly anything for a full 30 seconds. We basically decided to make sure we looked at Important Things as identified by the museum map. Here's one, by Vermeer:
Same guy who painted "The Girl With The Pearl Earring". Which is not at the Louvre.
We were on the second floor of the museum - for the most part it was straight walking, broken up by random 5-steps-up-and-5-steps-down things, like at the M'O. We were almost completely by ourselves - we seemed to have lost all those people who had crowded the main lobboy. Which was just fine.
And I'm sure you all will be relieved to hear that there wasn't much of a bathroom story today. There were bathrooms all over the place. Except for the ones that were closed/"out of order" at inconvenient times. Or the bathroom that had one stall for men and onen stall for women (they were labeled). And when I came out of the women's stall, there was a woman waiting even though THE MEN'S STALL WAS EMPTY AND THERE WAS NO MAN IN THE ROOM.
But I digress.
After we finished locating Important Things on the 2nd floor, we went to lunch. I had a really nice chicken ceasar salad (fresh and tasty all white meat chicken and freshly grated parmigean cheese). For dessert we shared something that had 3 different kinds of chocolate. Awesome. My new Favorite Thing!
After lunch we tackled the 1st floor, where the Mona Lisa and a bunch of other Important Things resided. We realized we had found all the people who had been missing on the 2nd floor. Good thing it's technically "off season" - I had imagined the Louvre being wall-to-wall people, but it was only half as bad as that on the 1st floor.
We made our way around towards the Mona Lisa at a leisurely pace (seemed no reason to run into a madhouse) and checked off one other Important Thing:
This is the "Winged Victory of Samothrace".But of course you knew that.
There was a small mob around this statue. What was amazing was how people had no compunction at all about walking up and standing right in front of me, even though I was standing right there with my iPad up about to take the picture. Hah! that was just the beginning.
When we walked into the room with the Mona Lisa, this is what we saw:
Since I had expected the crowd to be overflowing into the hallway, this was nothing. Absolutely nothing - A PIECE OF CAKE. Helps to be a veteran of the NYC subway as well as the NYC marathon spectator crowd. Elbows UP! I'm going in!
In no time at all, I'm up by the rope, but I'm off to the right side. Gradually, as people took their photos and left, and I oozed my way over closer to the center. I kept snapping pictures in case for some reason I just couldn't get to dead center. The spot to my immediate left rotated amongst a family - daughter, mom, grandmother - but when Grandma gets up there, not only does she take her time taking her photo, she then has to take a selfie. I can't imagine what kind of shot she was able to get.
Once she finally left, I immediately oozed into her spot and got the shot that's at the beginning of this blog entry. After that, I'm done and I oozed my way back out of the crowd.
There were a bunch of Important Things in the immediate area, so we were able to knock a few off the list.
We were done with the 1st floor and headed down to the Ground Floor, where we left the maddening crowd behind once again; the rooms were pretty empty.
We had hoped to avoid "antiquities" (the last few years of vacations/cruises we've seen enough "antiquities" to last us a while - no urge to see yet one more exciting Greek or Roman pot). However, there were several Important Things in that area. My favorite was not the Venus de Milor or even the Michangelo. It was this little guy:
The photo makes him look a lot bigger than his actually is (maybe 18"?).
By this time it's getting pretty late in the afternoon, and I'm starting to run out of steam. To make matters worse, the Ground (0) floor and the -1 floor were absolutely crazy with staircases. To deal with the fact that these floors were right below street level, there were countless times that we had to go down a full flight of stairs, walk 10 feet, then climb right back up. This happened over and over and over again. Sometimes, if we were lucky, there would be an elevator at the bottom of the stairs, which helped eliminate the climb up. Actually there were oodles of elevators, but it takes some super-familiarity with the museum to really take advantage of them and minimize the stair climbing.
Between that and the slow zombie-shuffling museum-viewing gait - on the extremely hard stone floors - my legs and feet were done for the day by about 6:00. Even ibuprofen and constant little breaks sitting down (yes, another nice feature of this museum was ample sitting opportunities), didn't do the trick.
By 7:00 or so we gave up and headed to dinner, even though there was still a chunk of museum to go. But, we had seen all the Important Things on the Ground, 1st and 2nd floors (well ok we missed a couple on the 1st floor).
And we had seen the Mona Lisa, so now we're done with Paris, right?
So why do I like the M'O better than the Louvre:
(1) It's all about paintings from 1870 to 1910 (Impressionists), which is my favorite period and my favorite painters. The Louvre is a kitchen sink with all sorts of stuff flung in
(2) It's easily done in one day. The Louvre, not really.
(3) The M'O is better oranized and much less crazy stair case issue.
But we have the Musee Rodin next week - we'll see if Rodin can knock the M'O off its pedestal.
We walked back to the San Michele neighborhood that's right near our hotel (my feet were not going to go any further). Dinner was disappointing - the food was good, but not anything special or particularly French. But by the time we figured this out, it was too late to move again.
Tomorrow: Versaille. (assuming we figure out where the train to Versaille is).
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