Paris: May 13: The Louvre

I took many pictures this day. Di Yin also took some, though fewer than usual because her camera ran out of batteries and she had to borrow mine every time she wanted to take a picture. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #49 in the album). When you see a picture captioned "Day 3" (picture #121), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

A bit jetlagged, we awoke and took a nice early-morning stroll to a nearby market. However, at the time we arrived (8:30am), the market wasn't yet open. Nevertheless, we could tell it had a good selection of prepared food stalls and would be a good destination for a meal when they were open. Indeed, a week later we had lunch at the market. But this time, instead, we ate breakfast at a nearby cafe with a nice Parisian atmosphere.

We decided to use our first full day in Paris to go to the Louvre. Partially this was because people say to get to the Louvre around when it opens (and we were already up early), and partially this was because I knew the Louvre is open late on Fridays (this day) and hence we'd have tons of time of see everything we wanted to see.

The Louvre covers art and antiquities from the ancient world up through the mid/late 1800s. (Other museums in Paris cover more recent art.) Yes, that's a lot of time! It's as big as the British Museum or the Met, and as intimidating to do in one day. Its collection especially includes countless Greek, Roman, and Etruscan statues and innumerable European paintings covering many centuries, and also Egyptian artifacts and European decoration arts. And yes, they have the big names you'd expect in paintings: a room of Rembrandts, another of Renoirs, another of Corots.

The Louvre is notable to me because, of all the museums I've visited, it has the best views as one glances out the windows and glimpses the Louvre's external architecture. It's not notable to me for its collection. The type of stuff it shows is not my cup of tea.

I was warned the Louvre would be crowded. I generally agree the warning was right. And this was on a weekday morning in May! I can't imagine what it would be like on a weekend in the height to tourist season. However, when I later got to parts of the Louvre away from its five or so most famous pieces and away from the routes to those pieces, it became more comfortable, reasonably uncrowded like a normal museum. But those masterpieces were crowded! The crowd around the Mona Lisa was so thick that, even though people weren't supposed to use flashes, flashes went off accidentally regularly and the guards had given up trying to correct people.

Incidentally, the Louvre first opened to the public in 1793, making it older than what I thought was the oldest museum, the V&A Museum in London. I later realized a number of museums in Paris were founded at the tail end of the eighteenth century.

I paid for the audio guide but found it icky. The masterpieces tour skips too much, yet doesn't say enough about the pieces it considers. The other pre-programmed tours are actually lists of detailed things to listen to on particular routes. I wish it was easier to find audio details regardless of any selected tour, but the interface for this was clunky. If I was in a particular place (not intentionally following a route), trying to figure out if any of the tours have information on the room or any pieces within it was nearly impossible. To determine if any of the routes passed through a particular area, one had to trace each route on the device one by one, a painstaking process that I only tried once.

Or maybe all this is just rationalization when my main problem was that I found the commentary uninteresting.

Or maybe my poor impression of the guide stems from bitterness--my audio guide froze twice, requiring long treks to the entrance to get it replaced.

I had a much better experience when I finally gave up on the audio guide and walked around with Di Yin. She's a great tour guide.

The Louvre has few informative signs, and practically none are translated into English. Sure, there were laminated handouts in English for each room, but these were a pain to deal with.

We took a mid-day break from the museum for lunch. We walked over the Pont du Carrousel bridge and into the Saint Germain des Pres neighborhood. We ate at Le Petit Saint Benoit.

After lunch, we stopped by the Musee (museum) Eugene Delacroix, mainly because we got free admission with our ticket for the Louvre. Eugene Delacroix is a nineteenth-century painter. This small museum is housed in his three-room apartment and adjacent three-room studio. Di Yin really liked the space. I thought in retrospect the main justification for the visit was not the art but the attractive small garden in the back.

On the way back to the Louvre, we passed many art galleries on Rue de Seine. The density is probably related to being on the left bank yet in close proximity to the Louvre.

Once back at the Louvre, we explored the two current special exhibits. The exhibit on Rembrandt's images of Christ was not often my thing, but the emotionality of Rembrandt's paintings made them engaging. The other exhibit showed Claude Lorrain's drawings, drawings by "the greatest landscape painter of his era" (the 17th century, when landscape painting was starting to get popular in Rome). In this exhibit I discovered I like Lorrain's paintings better than his drawings. (They had a few paintings on display despite the exhibit being focused on his drawings.) Later in the regular collection I spotted one of his paintings and liked it enough to photograph it.

After the temporary exhibits, we went back to exploring the Louvre.

We ended up spending a ton of time in the museum: we arrived shortly after opening (say, 9:20am), left for lunch and other stuff around 1:00pm, returned at 4:00pm, and finally left at 8:20pm. (We were lucky the museum stays open late on Fridays.) Nevertheless, we skipped some rooms including a whole floor of a wing. We also only visited many rooms by walking through them without slowing.

This was the most time I've ever spent in museums in one day. In this case, basically all the time was spent in a single museum. It was too much.

From the museum, we walked through Les Halles on the way home. The area has some large squares with many people hanging out, but it's less appealing than it could be because of the large number of fast food restaurants nearby and consequently the type of people who choose to hang out there. On another day, however, I walked through the area again and decided it wasn't as seedy as it at first appeared. My impression was colored because I just wanted to get home.

We ate at Le Hangar, a cute bistro near our apartment. It felt like a secret place, hidden as it is down what appears to be empty alley and around the corner so as to be concealed from the street. It homey as well: we were served by a mother-daughter pair. There were other waitresses too. As usual, details are in the pictures, but I should say that it was another satisfying meal. We left full but not stuffed.

And thus concluded a more than 14 hour day exploring Paris.