Paris: Revisited - pt. 1

The day I went to the Louvre (my Thursday in Paris), I walked there from my hotel near the Place de la Republique. I spent maybe 5 hours in the Louvre. It's impossible to see the entire collection in one day (hello, 100,000 pieces of art!) so I started with the antiquities (I saw a de-mummified mummy!), moved on to the Italian sculptures, visited the 18th century Italian painters, where you can see Mona Lisa - if you can get through the throng ... Da Vinci Code mania, let me tell you. There is even a Da Vinci Code tour of the Louvre - not to mention the Da Vinci Code tour of Paris.

More sculpture - more Italian painters, before moving on to painters from France, Germany & Holland. Eventually, they all begin to blur together - I think this may be why people advise taking a few days to view the Louvre. You can only see the same scenes, depicted over and over so many times before you begin to go cross-eyed looking at them. As Mejane pointed out to me, it wasn't until fairly recently that painters could paint what they wanted, and not what they were commissioned to paint. Still, there were some highlights.

I loved Delacroix's Death of Sardanapole and Delarouche's Le Jeune Martyre. They're both so dark, yet to me, utterly beautiful.

Delacroix's piece was the reason I later went to Eglise Saint Suplice. I had an initial aversion, not wanting to follow the Da Vinci trail, but the chance to see Delacroix's murals there was one I decided not to pass up.

You know what you shouldn't do after walking from your hotel to the Louvre, and spending hours there? Decide to walk from the Louvre, up the Champs Elysee to the Arc D'Triomphe.

Because eventually you're going to have to walk back.

I almost went and saw the Da Vinci Code in the theatre that afternoon just to give my feet a rest.

Instead, I braved the Paris Metro. Luckily, some jerk in line in front of me took 5 minutes to buy his Metro ticket because he refused to hang up his cell phone. This didn't give me time enough to figure the machine out, but it did give the very androgynous guy behind me the chance to get fed up, so when I approached the screen and faltered for half a second, he came to my rescue and completed the process for me. I'm a quick study, so I watched his process and after that, had no trouble using the Metro ticketing machines.

I had my last solo meal in Paris that night. I was so starved for fresh vegetables at this point, I ordered a big salad with my dinner, and when they brought me a huge bowl full of romaine mixed with iceberg, and one sad cut-up roma tomato, with just enough French dressing, I inhaled that bowl full of lettuce as quickly as I could.

Everyone who knew me as a child has now keeled over in shock at the idea that *I* craved vegetables.

***

Friday saw my last tours of Paris museums, with a visit to the Musee D'Orsay & the Centre Pompidou. D'Orsay was formerly a train station, and trust me to go there on the one hot day of the Paris leg of my trip - guess what happens when the ceiling is made of glass? Yep, you cook.

In the rooms safe from the sunlight, there are sections devoted to Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Neo-Impressionists. There was also a good section of pastels, but they were in rooms so dark that without a flash, the pictures just came out blurry or black. A shame, too. I really liked Degas' pastels.

This is the best example I could manage:


The Centre Pompidou was something completely different. For a start, most of the permanent collection was closed, so what I got to see was mostly the current exhibit, devoted to moving images. Instead of paintings and sculpture, there were videos, rooms where light was the key, installations and slide shows.