So you wanna see the Mona Lisa, eh?
Next morning we're off to the Louvre. We have our choice of two or three bakeries a block from the hotel; we load up on pastries, some jus de pamplemousse from the market at the end of the block, Metro our way to the Tuilieries gardens, and eat our breakfast facing the carnival on the north side.
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| A small dose of Louvre. |
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| You, too, can have one of these. Simply restore a nation's faith in itself and conquer most of Europe before your 35th birthday. Of course, you also have to become a megalomaniac, grossly overextend the abilities of your nation and get your armies slaughtered, then sit on a rock for twenty years under guard stewing in your own delusions before dropping dead. |
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With the museum pass you enter on the north side of the palace through the Richelieu wing, zipping right past the 100-deep ticket line at the pyramid. We collect the usual papers and so forth at the desk; we're five minutes too late for the English tour so we head upstairs to rent audioguides.
We catch the English-language tour as it makes its way through the foundation-of-the-old-Louvre exhibit, but by the time we get back up to the galleries it turns into something of a Tower of Babel with the other tour guides teling their stories. We can barely hear the guide unless we're right in front, so we go our own way.
The Louvre is very impressive if you're into antiquities, worth seeing if into art, and a rather impressive building in itself (the audioguide points out, of course, that when the Louvre was used as a royal palace, the stairwells were the customary place for courtiers to void their bladders...) But there's far too much to cover in one pass, and if you have specific interests you'd best do a little research and plan your visit in advance. It's very easy to invest many hours in the production of blisters walking through seemingly endless halls of stuff you couldn't give a damn about, and completely miss the collections and galleries you want to see.
Out of the Louvre we catch a No. 69 bus back toward the hotel - the bus may be slower, but it's nice to be above-ground for a change. Eva grabs a quick bite of sushi in a shop on Rue Cler. A brief rest and we're off to the Invalides.
The Invalides still functions as a military rest home, though of course its claim to fame as a tourist attraction is mainly its collection of boxed Bonapartes. The tombs of Napoleon I and some of his siblings are found here, as well as Foch, Turenne, and other of similar note. The attached Musee de l'Armee has exhibit after exhibit on uniforms and light weaponry from the days of Francois I on up, a better relief map of the Verdun area during WWI than anything seen at Verdun, and (during our visit) a predictably revisionist presentation on Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.
Leaving the Invalides, Eva's feeling energetic, so we keep going, and going, and going - into town, along the Seine, and eventually down to the Bateaux-Mouches dock. Fly boats - reputedly called thus because they cruise down the Seine at night with big batteries of floodlights on, attracting flies and annoying the residents. Bateaux-Mouches is by no means the only operator of these things - Bateaux Parisiens may be bigger - and the parking lots of both firms are teeming with tour buses. The tour is decently interesting, and the mechanical variety of the various tour boats and their gantry-mounted pilothouses (raised for docking, lowered for passing beneath bridges) is pretty entertaining in itself.
Following the boat ride, we walk along east of the Bateaux-Mouches dock and come across the Pont de l'Alma underpass where one Diana Spencer (formerly Princess of Wales) and her companion paid the ultimate price for - among other errors of judgment - being too bloody lazy to put on their seatbelts. No official markers, but several fresh flower-beds, and some third-party devotional scrawlings. Excuse me, but... yawn. Celebrity does not make one immune to the laws of physics.
We continue on looking for restaurants but never quite decide on one, and eventually drift back toward that Tower thing and get in line. Ride up, look around, get in line for the top, look around, get in line to come back down. You're in Paris for the first time, I guess you've got to do the Eiffel Tower. But we leave with a strong feeling that it isn't something we ever need to do again. The view is interesting, but there's no way it's worth two hours in line.
We head back to the hotel, gnaw on the remainder of the previous day's baguette and a couple pieces of fruit and sack out. Our feet are about to fall off, it's been a long day, but an interesting one.