today was day one on 'be a tourist except not be as loud as them' journey. and on the agenda, was the louvre, the musee de l'orangerie, the champs-elysees, and the arc de triomphe. for a grand woobang of 8 miles of walking and 284 stairs.
first off, if you've never heard of rick steves, google him now. and anytime you go to any place in europe for any length of time, buy a rick steve's guide book on the area. then go to his website and download his podcasts (if avail) and listen to his podcasts while you're on the tour. aside from the small details like entire sections of closed artwork, and rearranged museums that don't coorelate with the audiotour... aside from those small pieces of unnecessary detail, it's awesome, and you won't regret it.
we started today at the louvre.
after getting lost trying to find our way through rick steve's audioguide because the louvre closed down one whole section and rearranged another, we found ourselves at the winged victory
and she was awesome. by far my favorite thing at the louvre. a breathtaking piece of artwork, she should be duplicated, except like... made into a lords of the ring ginormous statue, and she should guard the straights of gibralter.
we then found our way miraculously (since the signs only pointed to it 5000 times), to the venus de milo. where you find yourself wondering what exactly her hands were doing before they got chopped off. i'd like to think she was picking a wedgie as i hear was the problem with wearing sheets in those days...
and if you look up from the room next door from venus, you'll see this pretty bodacious cieling paining of icarus falling from the skies as his wings melt from trying to fly to close to the sun. interesting, except the theory behind it is a little off... since flying higher in the atmosphere actually causes the temperature to be cooler with the lack of oxygen, making it quite difficult for me to believe that icarus' wings would melted since... yeah ok i hear your dork alarms ringing. let's move on.
cool hallway.
random pictures in front of some equally random da vinci painting
and then... the mona lisa. i saw it, was marginally impressed, made me think dan brown as a bigger idiot than before for reading so much into such a small painting, and crossed it off my list of things to see before i die.
oh and in case you were wondering how small it really is?
but... oddly enough, one of the best parts of the day was this little picnic we had right outside of the louvre. at the butt crack of dawn (translated from quinn time to regular time as 8:00AM), we went and got a baugette from a local bakery. cut up some tomatoes, some brie cheese, throw down some arugla, a splash of sea salt, and you get yourself an instant cheap delicious healthy lunch! you can see grace defending her territory as i try to sneak in a bite of hers.
making our way to the orangerie museum, here's what i would recommend. make sure you get the museum pass as paying however much to enter this museum alone is probably a ripoff, and then just look at the monet murals, as the whole downstairs impressionist paintings to me was just... eh.
on the last leg of our trip, we made our way down champ elysees, and visited the arc de triumphe
finishing the day required a pastry, so if you are going to go to a pastry house and only have like 30 minutes in paris, this is the place to go, order the macaroons, and the apple tart, and you will want to thank me profusely. i take cash. and ladure apple tarts
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