| From: "Bron Gondwana" <brong@brong.net> Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:37:32 +1100 (EST) |
We managed to fight off the hot-chocolate induced tiredness and make it to the Louvre before 10am (not bad when you look at the metro swaps required) and grabbed audio guides. The guides were good, but there weren't enough things with numbers on them (maybe we just did the wrong bits...) and they tended to go on for too long about each piece. We really just wanted a translation of what the French said (especially where they had translated the Ancient Mesopotamian Hieroglyphics or similar into French, and _DIDN'T_ do the same into English on the audioguide. Grrrrrrrrrr) So, we started by trying to look at the history of the Louvre, but it was all in French, so we went and looked at the (yet another) Egyptian collection, then upstairs to look at giant paintings (including the Mona Lisa - though we missed the audioguide number for that due to the crowds. I believe it was probably a reproduction on display, there just wasn't enough security around it. As if 99.9999999% of people there could tell the difference anyway. It was surprisingly small in comparison to all the other paintings in the area). Anyway, we stopped for lunch in the middle (a picnic on a bench in the foyer...), but spent all the rest of the time from 10am to 5:30pm looking at stuff! We were so tired by the end. Didn't see everything we wanted to either - especially the bit on Napoleon (which was closed on Mondays, grr - they don't have enough staff to have everything open at once, so something is always shut) It was raining really hard when we got out, so we grabbed some more instant pasta stuff and went straight back to the hostel. The kitchen was even more crap than usual, and we managed to spill pasta everywhere (OK, I managed...) The floor of the kitchen was wet and on a slope (which meant the table was on a slope, which meant the hotplate was on a slope.. it's all really dangerous) and I slipped while trying to pour stuff out of the pot. Very not impressed with that, but that's OK - we were leaving soon. |
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