Day 45: Defeating the Louvre

Today was the extended hours day at the Louvre, so I planned to get there early and get as much time out of it as I could. I know that spending my entire first real day in Paris in a museum seems a bit silly, but I find it's a good idea to accomplish your top destinations early since you never know what might happen afterwards. My plans changed a bit in the morning because it was fairly nice out, and after spending yesterday sitting on trains I really felt like giving my legs a stretch. Instead of going straight to the Louvre I took the subway to the Arc de Triomphe and walked from there down the Champs-Élysées to the Seine then following the river to the museum.

The lines hummed along nicely and it only took maybe 10 minutes to get in and get a ticket. People say that you need to dedicate at least a couple days to the Louvre to see everything, but they're apparently wrong. It only took me about 9 straight hours to get through the entire thing (11:30-8:30) - but I didn't buy one of the portable guide things, which I'm sure would have added more time to things. The highlight for me - as usual - was the sculpture, which the Louvre has an amazing selection of. Three of my top favourites are at the Louvre (Nike at Samothrace, Cupid & Psyche and a random Artemis statue nobody else cares about), but there were a lot of other great newer pieces as well, especially French and Italian.

There are certainly a lot of paintings as well, but I wasn't too blown away by most of them. For the most part I found the architecture and paintings on the ceilings more interesting than a lot of the paints actually held in the room. The Mona Lisa was as underwhelming as I expected, but there definitely were some pieces that I liked a lot.

It was a really nice evening out by the time I got out, so after watching a pretty comical chase of two police on rollerblades trying to catch a group of people selling cheap souvenirs on the museum grounds, I hit the streets and started heading in the direction of my hostel by foot. It's quite a distance away, and I didn't really plan on walking the entire distance, but I figured it was a good direction to start in. Normally I make a mental directory of fancy buildings to navigate by as I spend more time in a city, but in Paris there are way too many fancy buildings. It seems like every few intersections there is some elaborate palace or museum. I don't even know what half of the big decorative buildings I see are for. The sun was going down though, which made directions easy, so I just kept heading north-east taking detours as things caught my eye. I found myself below the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur so I headed up to check that out and enjoy the view of the Paris skyline. By this point I was getting a bit tired so I took the metro back towards my hostel to call it a night.

Because of scheduling/booking issues I've pretty much given up on my original plan of spending a few days in Lyon after Paris. I think I'll just book a couple more days in Paris, and since I still have some flexibility with my eurail pass maybe take a few day trips by train down to check out some nearby cities and towns. There seems to be ample to do around, so it should work out fine. I still need to start booking things in Italy though.