Day 7: Paris

We finished off our stay in Paris with a trip to the Louvre, which turned out to be more of an ordeal than any of us expected.  We took the metro, which unlike London, we never exactly figured out, strolled through the well-manicured and heavily populated Tuileries gardens, and found our way to the entrance at the weirdly anachronistic glass pyramid.

 

The wait time was almost zero, which was nice, until we got inside and realized that the entire global population of 7.093 billion people inside the museum had also experienced remarkable ease in getting in. We sort of stood around for a minute and then made the decision to choose the nearest gallery (Denon) and contain our museum-ing to that area. I realize that seems super lame, but keep in mind that the Louvre is horrifically large and that trying to see even a respectable percentage of its contents would require several days, or even weeks.

The Louvre required us to show our tickets again upon entering the gallery, and it was there that we ran into some trouble. Again, thanks to Mom's planning, we didn't need to wait in line for museum tickets because we had a museum pass, valid for four days from the date written on the front. However, we got some weird looks when we flashed our passed at the gallery entrance. The guy pulled the four of us aside and with a stern look said, "You can't do that." He then whipped out a stamp and, covering up the dates we had written two days ago at Notre Dame, stamped "23 JUNE 2013."

The hand-written date said 24 June 2013.

We all wrote that on our cards. Two days ago.

For several days, none of us had any idea of the correct date.

The guy at the ticket booth must have thought we were trying to get an extra day out of our four-day pass. Explaining the truth just would have been too weird, so we apologized and walked away feeling a weird mix of shame and intense confusion.

Having survived the what-day-is-it fiasco, we finally got into Denon. It just so happened that the gallery we chose at random was home to some of the Louvre's most famous contents, so we got to see the Mona Lisa, the Crown Jewels, Nike of Samothrace, and Venus  de Milo.

Aside from the art, the Louvre itself was stunning. It was just as grand, if not more so, as Versailles, and way, way more spacious. Each room was more beautiful than the last, it seemed, and in some cases, the architecture and design distracted from the art.

 

 

After the Louvre, we got our luggage and a cab ride to the train station, where we boarded a night train to Munich. The night train was an enormous amount of fun, if not the most comfortable experience. The cabins were tiny and devoid of diversion, so we pulled out the impressive amount of beer we'd stashed away over the past week, some bread and cheese, and some fruit we'd grabbed from a market on the way out and had ourselves a party. That is, we had ourselves a party until someone filed a noise complaint and we were told to shut up. After that, we finished our drinks and headed to "bed" (wooden plank with sheets). A few hours later, we woke up in Munich...