Sunday, July 11
Yikes! We slept in until almost 9:00 this morning! We were so tired from yesterday, I suppose. At least there wasn't a train to catch, I guess. We had ~planned~ to be at the Louvre when it opened at 9:00. After getting ready--oh, it was so hard to get out of bed!--and packing everything up, we went to leave our stuff at the train station. They had this crazy security system to let you into the locker room. I guess they're just not worried about people bombing the trains, just the lockers. We finally got to the Louvre about 11:00 and ate lunch at a really good cafeteria there. They had lots and lots of different stuff to eat. I had a pizza and Greg got Chineese food, so we were happy. We had to wait in line for tickets, but not for all that long. We got in right at 12:00 and didn't leave until 3:30. That museum was so incredible! Everyone in the world should get to go. The amount of stuff they have is so overwhealming. The Egyptian, Greek, and Ancient Near-Eastern exhibits impressed me the most. The "Mona Lisa" was hilarious because there's about 200 idiots crowding in a line to see it. Then they take flash pictures of the painting, which is behind glass. As if any of that will turn out. It was interesting to me that they only "strongly discourage" flash use instead of forbidding it like all the Italian museums do. It was really neat to see all the paintings we've been studying for the past months. Some were smaller or bigger than I thought, some were darker colored than our pictures. The building itself was very impressive; there was a whole section on the history of the Louvre which was neat. It's also enormous! We must have walked ~at least~ five miles in those three and a half hours. Afterwards we found a book we really liked, but it turned out to be $90! So we settled for a $20 book instead. We drank cokes in the cafeteria while we rested our feet and tried to get out of the brain-stupor caused by so much art. We then went to the train station about 5:30 to see if any souvenir stores would still be open. Thing was, there weren't any! We thought that was really odd, and Greg never did get a t-shirt. So we sat around and wrote in our journals for awhile, then we ate. Our train ended up being 45 minutes late. The frustrating part was that they would never tell anyone how late it was, they just kept saying that it was late. It was very frustrating.
--Angelique