Our BetterMost Community > Chez Tremblay
An American Girl in Paris
Ellemeno:
I love this, delalluvia! I'm looking forward to every story! :)
Penthesilea:
--- Quote from: Ellemeno on October 26, 2007, 08:08:37 am ---I love this, delalluvia! I'm looking forward to every story! :)
--- End quote ---
So do I :)
delalluvia:
Sister: Are you through posing with naked guys yet?
Me: Nope.
The Louvre was everything you might have heard regarding this massive palace turned museum.
It was just as awesome, inspiring, breathtaking, beautiful, overwhelming, confusing and crowded as one might have imagined.
My first impression?
"Stinks down here."
Since the weather was supposed to be the worst on a certain day, we chose that day to go to the Louvre since we knew we would spend hours there and it would be all inside. Our local Metro station took us straight to the underground entrance there. It was blasting rain and the clouds were low and as dark as twilight when we arrived, and if that daunted the other tourists, you couldn't tell.
Again, no fire regulations. You got in, regardless of the crowds.
I forced my sister to choose the areas she wanted particularly to visit. We were not going to have the time necessary to take in the whole thing, obviously.
We saw Victory on its huge pedestal. Amazing work, different shades of stone, jostling crowds, flashes going off left and right, you stepping accidentally into other people's photographs and becoming immortalized forever on someone's else's vacation shots (my sister shoved me forward as a volunteer to try dowsing rods and leylines at Stonehenge that trip. You would have been deafened by the sounds of digital cameras whirring to life to record every movement I made).
The museum discouraged flash photography for the artwork. The statues were fair game (however, we were rousted at the Musee D'Orsay for using flash on a huge statue representing Dante's Inferno. WTF? I can understand this rule for the paintings, but statues?!?!? It's ROCK! No flash is going to budge a single molecule. If someone can explain this rule to me, please do.)
My choices were the Greek, Etruscan, Roman statuary. This was on a lower floor, below the Victory. We got down there and instantly recoiled.
"Whew! What IS that stink?"
"Can't smell like this all the time."
Our theory was due to the weather or other mischievous activity, a toilet somewhere on the bottom level had backed up and the smell of sewage was everywhere. Luckily for everyone, any methane gas that might have accompanied it, stayed in the lower levels and didn't fill up the whole place and blow us all to kingdom come.
Anyway, we found an elevator and took it back upstairs - by this time I was anticipating my sister's weakness - and just like the DaVinci Code, we spotted the parquet wood floor long before we were able to strongarm our way in front to see the great lady Mona Lisa. She was very small, 25 feet away from roped off crowds, behind plexiglass, under controlled atmosphere, in the dark which just begged for flash, with two guards around her at all times.
Other works were astounding. The famous Napoleon Crowning Josephine was like 19 feet by 30 feet. Just ungodly in its size. Can you imagine the hundred of pounds of handmade paint that would have been needed to paint such a master work? I tried to find other DaVinci Code favorites, but was unsuccessful.
Security was very attentive. You could see the strings running along the wall, motion or heat sensors, I imagine. I was inbetween galleries, looking at some of the statuary among the paintings they had every 50 feet or so, when the alarm went off. Someone was threatening a painting!
I dodged into a room quickly - not wanting to get crushed by the security doors clanking down.
:-\
Well, that's what happened in the movie!
Nothing happened. My sister was closer to the action than I, and she reported later that a woman was just leaning too close to one painting and set off the alarm. Security came running and just cautioned her back. That was it.
As an aside, I noticed a lot more police action in Paris than London. Heard and saw the cops in street action maybe twice in London - once nearly getting run over in front of a Sainsbury when the cops came rushing out and jumped into their cars and peeled off burning rubber the whole way. Guess the store ran out of doughnuts - or so my sister guessed. ;D
In Paris, there were cops and ambulances every day, many times a day, sirens going off. Either Paris has a lot more criminal activity than London, or the cops there make a big deal out of every little thing. One fender-bender I spotted while reading outside the Shakespeare and Co., bookstore involved a woman who'd been knocked off her scooter. She was being helped back onto it by 5 cops, one other cop was talking to the driver who hit her.
Another incident involved some altercation in the Metro, again a woman accusing some man of something bad. Four cops around her, keeping her from pummeling the man, Metro officials and one other cop talking to the man under suspicion.
Go figure.
My sister favored Renaissance art, which meant canvas after canvas of Madonnas with child or martyrs which, after a while, made my eyes glaze over. I did note that whenever an artist painted David's Triumph over Goliath, there was a woman playing the tambourine in the young sling master's entourage. I did a survey and spotted 5 Triumphs and - yep - 5 tambourine slappin' strumpets in 'em.
My sister refused to take photos of them.
Maybe the tambourine was a popular instrument back in the Renaissance? I'm pretty sure it wasn't around during Old Testament days.
I suppose I was too overwhelmed by the Louvre. It was too much. So much to take in, absorb, see, want to see. Yet, I couldn't quite get into it. I felt more impressed and awed by it in the DaVinci Code movie. I suppose because the characters in that movie were able to be there alone. When you're constantly backing into people or blocking their view or they're in your way, you see and feel less of the grand structure than you do your fellow art lover.
A friend asked me about my London trip once - did I feel the grandeur and age and history of humanity that had come before me in some of these centuries old structures?
I replied no, because you didn't have a chance to. You were always on a conveyor belt of tourists, rushing in and out.
I could have spent hours just gazing at the ceiling art, absorbing the vast airy galleries, feeling the weight of time and history, but standing there gaping, you were obviously in the way and made to feel like it.
My main regret for not having as much time as I would like in these places.
injest:
MAN! what an awesome trip. Tell you what....you and me will go and we will spend the whole week in there. I will just SHOVE people out of the way...I am never gonna see them again what do I care? LOL!!
;) ;)
Kelda:
hee like the smily faces!! (and the stories!!)
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