Day 46 Paris

Today was the high-culture highlight of the tour - the Louvre. We arrived at 9:30 and were in within five minutes or so. Entry is under the glass pyramid and once inside the palace proper we could see them queueing outside. We made a beeline for the Mona Lisa, but there was already a sizeable crowd around it, arranged in a semi-circle to keep the riff-raff at a safe distance. The painting itself is smaller than I expected and with the mandatory buffer it was hard/impossible to discern detail. 

The Louvre is an amazing building - it was a palace after all and is just a stunning setting for all these works of art. Even recent renovations are really well done. When I first heard about the pyramid years ago I wasn't impressed, but the reality seems to work very well. As mentioned yesterday, the underground Carousel shopping complex complements this nicely.  The magnitude and quality of the collection is just overwhelming so taking in even a fraction of it is just about impossible - my brain is already chock full of art!

Actually, the most recent input seems to displace the earlier ones.
We spent about equal time in the Denon and Richelieu wings - 4.5 hours in all, mainly looking at Renaissance: Flemish, Dutch and Italian paintings, but we found a few Cranach and Duerer as well. We were certainly tired after this, but not as much as we had feared.

Although photography was surprisingly allowed almost everywhere, in many galleries there was a lot of glare, due to too much direct light from outside and also glass over lower paintings, so not that many photos are good. I wanted to kick myself for leaving the polarizing filter at the hotel. But then I would have had to bump the ISO up even more…

After lunch in the Louvre café we exited by ascending the large spiral staircase under the pyramid. We walked through the Tuileries Gardens onto the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomph. The upper end of the Champs Elysees is very elegant, with many up-market shops. The great thing here is that the pedestrian area on either side is vast and it needed to be - there was a throng of people rushing up and down. It gives you a great feeling walking along it. It was only as we were walking along it that it occurred to me that the name means Elysian Fields - nice.

We took the underground passage to come up again under the Arc itself. It is only then that you can fully appreciate it's size - it's huge. I wasn't able to work out what war it was celebrating, but possibly those of Napoleon.

We took the L2 Metro for a direct trip back to base at Anvers.



Dinner up in Montmartre again. Food okay but service poor.

May be several days before next blog.