The Louvre

Mona Lisa, it was a scrum to get to it

Saturday April 23^rd

After skyping home and sending our Easter wishes we headed off to the Louvre. We had pre booked our tickets but unfortunately when we went to pick them up  on Thursday there was a problem with the ticketing system and we were advised that we needed to pick them up elsewhere.  That confirmed our decision to do an organised tour of the Louvre.  Being Easter week end there have been large numbers of people lining up to see all of the major attractions, so we felt it wise to go with an organised tour to get us through without a wait.

The Louvre is the world's largest museum.  With 30,000 works of art you could spend hours upon hours looking at it all. In fact they say if you spend 1 minute at each exhibit during every possible opening hour it will take you 3 months to see it all.  We decided we wanted to witness the marvels, though not to the extent that it would eat into the rest of our time.  Going to see the Mona Lisa may seem a bit cliché, but it is incredible to walk into the room and see her hanging there. There is a bit of a scrum to get to the front but Spock managed to get there without much of a problem and snapped away.  There is an amazing array of ancient artefacts, fantastic collections of paintings and the beautiful interior of the museum itself, words cannot do justice to describe the amazing visual experience at the Louvre.  I must admit to gaining a real appreciation for all this wonderful work.

After the tour we were exhausted and went and found a park to lay down and enjoy the wonderful day.  Many people were in the park doing the same thing.  One group had taken off all of their shoes and himself enjoyed watching a wee lad, who had obviously trodden in dog shit take the shit off his shoes and wipe it on those of his sisters!!  Boys are boys all over the world.

Just watching the weather report and the weather in Paris is 11 degrees above the normal spring temperature.  It has been 25 and over for the past four days and the normal temperature is around 14.  In no shape or form are we complaining.

At dinner this evening and after when we were having a few quiet drinks, my goodness we saw some sights.  We didn’t know it at the time but we were in a gay area, but we suspected as there was a very strong gay presence and flamboyantly so.  Men were marching down the streets branding their whips.  But the cake goes to the bald Asian persuasion man wearing the pleated skirt and long socks, even himself thought that was “worthy of a photo”.  Of course we wouldn’t’t be so rude.   But it was a very enlightening couple of hours.  Gay Paree was certainly very colourful this evening.  Himself would like it noted that he had escargot (snails) for dinner this evening and thoroughly enjoyed them.