Side Note: Paris - Part Deux

On Day 2, we dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early to make it to the Louvre before the crowds. We had a delightful breakfast of baguettes and French pastries from the bakery across the street from our hotel, and then we hopped on the Metro and headed to the museum.

Adeola, me, and Conny at the Louvre (photo courtesy of Marie)

For those of you who have never been, you should know that the Louvre is ENORMOUS. It used to be the palace of the French Royal Family before Louis XIV decided to construct Versailles, and it shows. I had been to the Louvre once before, on that same French trip five years back, but we had only been allotted two hours there, after a full day of touring, no less. The rest of the weary, whiny high schoolers in my group wanted nothing more than to see the Mona Lisa and find somewhere to sit down, while I, fresh out of my very first art history class, wanted to see as much as I could.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen, so I was determined to make up for it this time around. Fortunately, I had Conny with me, and she was similarly motivated. We grabbed a map, split off from Adeola and Marie, and charted our course throughout the museum.

Dear readers, I am proud to report that we spent SIX HOURS in the Louvre. Yes, that’s right, six whole hours admiring art – and certainly getting our workout in as well. I’m not sure how many miles of walking we clocked in, but it was probably quite a few. We stopped once, about three-and-a-half hours in, to drink some water, eat the remainder of Conny’s baguette from breakfast, and chart out the rest of our course.

All told, we still probably saw only half of the collection, but we did get to see all the big things we set out to find. I’ll admit that in the interest of time I did once or twice resort to a very touristy move: stopping, scanning the room, spotting the most famous piece of art contained therein, literally pointing at it and proclaiming “THERE!” then charging toward it while ignoring pretty much everything else.

Not really my preferred mode of exploring a museum, but after hour five I couldn’t really be held responsible for my actions.

After the Louvre we were all pretty exhausted. We spent more time than we should have wandering around and bickering mildly about where we should stop for lunch, and in the end just wound up heading back to the mall around the Louvre to grab sandwiches. It was already starting to get dark by the time we were fed and rested enough at our restaurant. We decided to slowly but surely make our way to next big touristy attraction:

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower was just as beautiful as I remembered it being, and was actually a tiny bit LESS crowded than it had been during the summer I’d seen it before. This was probably because it was foggy and pretty cold out, but I’ll take a bit of a chill over a throng of people any day. Plus, this time, I got to go all the way to the top of the tower, which had been closed for some reason the last time I was there.

Terrible, blurry, foggy shot of Paris from the top of the tower. I'm putting it up anyway.

We had planned to eat crepes at the little restaurant on top of the tower, but were dismayed to find that, so late at night, it was already closed. So after we had had our fill of views of Paris at night, we set out to find some crepes that were a bit cheaper than the overpriced places around the Tour Eiffel.

We found them, eventually, in the Latin Quarter, a popular student neighborhood. We stumbled across a pretty pale blue bakery with a crepe vendor stand outside. We bought our crepes (mine was banana with Nutella) and sat under the shelter of the heat-lamp-bedecked bakery awning to eat them. There was lots of talking and joking and a stressful failed attempt to make contact with the rest of our huge original group of Paris-bound friends (they were arriving that night).

Also, a clown showed up and settled down with his non-clown companion at the table next to ours. It was... funny.

My discreet, paparazzi-style photo of Monsieur Clown

And so ended our second night in Paris.