a big pyramid

Monday morning recap: I switched hotels yet again, had some lunch and headed to the Louvre for the afternoon.

The view of the Louvre from outside (including I.M.Pei's huge glass pyramid) is an essential part of the experience - which is why I was disappointed that the Metro stop dropped me directly under the museum. I walked inside and joined the throng of museum-goers waiting in line to buy tickets. With the amount of English floating through the air, I may as well have been in New York!

The Louvre is evidently a place to appreciate art, but I got just as much enjoyment observing the behavior of the people in the museum. The museum is divided into three major "wings"; by far the most crowded is the Denon wing, in which the Mona Lisa makes her ambiguous smile. Despite the signs clearly proclaiming "no cameras" in about sixteen languages, tourists pushed and shoved through the crowds to defy the rules and photograph Leonardo's masterpiece. The funniest though is when those people don't even stop to look at the painting sans lens - I saw one couple push through, take a picture, and instantly turn around and walk out.

Also, no one in the Denon wing seemed to notice the rest of the art lining the walls. In contrast to the other two wings, the Denon-goers were just pushing their way in a line to get to the Mona Lisa room, which was not as directly accessible from the entrance as it may have appeared on the map (in the same way that the milk isn't in the front of the grocery store. It's funny to think of paintings in the Louvre as bags of potato chips, positioned between visitors and their destination in order to attract some impulse buys.)

As for me, I didn't bring my camera into the museum. Photos of each of the 35,000+ works are available on the Internet, and they're much better than anything I could take with my digital camera in mediocre lighting. That was actually one thing that surprised me about the Louvre - most of the rooms on the upper floor featured skylight windows that cast a nasty glare on many of the paintings. I'd think the designers of a world-famous art museum might have considered such a thing.

All in all, I enjoyed my visit. Three hours is about my limit for a museum of any kind; I obviously didn't see all of the paintings, as a tourist jokingly asked me on my way out, but I don't think the point is to speed through as fast as possible and make sure you've stopped in every room.