Yesterday was our
first day exploring Paris! We had tickets to the Louvre, and we tacked on an
Eiffel tour trip too. The day before that was a big recovery day- we went grocery shopping and just rested.
We went through the
process of getting metro passes yesterday, and I'm glad we budgeted an hour of
buffer time into our trip because a lot of them were broken so we had to wait
awhile until the guy found two that worked. Then we had to take our photo in the
nearby photo booth and stick it onto our cards. Our headshots are not very
flattering, but they do the trick!
After about half an
hour on the metro we arrived at the Louvre. The weird thing was that we didn't
even need to go outside to get to it, it was connected to the metro station! So
to ground ourselves a little bit we went to the surface for a second. We were
right in the heart of Paris, in the Tuileries gardens. There weren't too many
people around because it was a rainy day, and a bit chilly for Paris (16
degrees or so). We didn't find it that bad though, and we had our raincoats so
we were set!
Rachel's breakfast:
Very fancy concierge pay toilets:
Once in the Louvre
(very good we had purchased online tickets- cut off about 45 min wait in line),
we started wandering around. We saw lots of renaissance paintings, medieval
paintings, religious paintings, etc. My favourite though has to be the Greek stuff
we saw- after so much theatre history it's really interesting for me to see the
actual urns and vases we saw pictures of in our textbooks. We found Dionysus
and his satyrs and we were excited to see our god of theatre in person. There
were also some very imposing statues of Zeus and Athena and pretty much all the
other Greek gods too.
After about three
hours we were completely worn out, so we stopped to rest in a little enclave in
the African, Oceanic, and American art section. We decided to call it a day- I
had a missive headache, was probably dehydrated, and needed food. So we started
the 20 minute trek back to the exit. On our way out we passed some indigenous
masks from BC- Kwakwaka'wakw variety. It was surreal to see halfway across the
world, and a little bit weird, especially since museums in general have a habit
of "preserving" cultures that are definitely still around.
The best lesbian knight (it was actually a young saint but who's counting):
Our pal Dionysus:
Literally me:
The Painting:
The surrounding chaos and madness:
Nike, goddess of victory:
Athena:
We took a break
outside the Louvre, and I ate some oranges I had packed and felt better. Then
we metro'd to the Eiffel tower to go see that. When we got there we found it
had been completely put behind a wall- a paywall. Thanks to capitalism, you now
had to pay to get even under the base of the tower. There were so many walls
around everything that it took us awhile to even find the park we wanted to sit
in. The main area of the park was also cordoned off because there was an art
project happening there ironically called "Beyond Walls." The whole
situation was completely ironic and pretty funny.
Me being tired at the end of Louvre visit:
After awhile my
headache started to come back, so we packed up and started heading back to the
metro. On the way home we got some genuine French macarons (all gluten free!)
and a prize winning baguette for Rachel. By the time we got home I was too
lightheaded to make food for myself, so Rachel heated up our Spanish tortilla
for the both of us. After eating and resting for a bit I felt a lot better.
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