The Louvre

I'm pretty tired of hearing myself talk at this point, but that won't keep me from rambling on and on about The Louvre and Notre Dame, because they were no less amazing than I had ever imagined them to be.

Eric and I somehow managed to find a back entrance to the Louvre and were in in less than 15 minutes flat. When we got to the top floor, I looked out the window, and there was an insanely long line. A couple that we met at our hotel told us later that they stood it in the same morning for over an hour and a half. I'm really not sure why we were able to go in where we did, but we'll consider it a blessing and move on :)

The Louvre was stunning in and of itself. It's so large, we knew there was no way we could ever see it all in one day. We aren't huge art aficionados anyway, so we picked out a few pieces that we were interested in and set out on our way.  

See aforementioned line snaking around to the left...

The one painting that I was dying to see in person...Joseph, the Carpenter by Georges de la Tour.

His use of light in this painting is breathtaking...my photos do it no justice. The light glowing through the boy's fingertips was incredible in person. In my opinion, much more impressive than the Mona Lisa! And Eric and I were the only ones around, so we got this little treasure all to ourselves :)

The Winged Victoroy was no less impressive because of where they have it positioned at the top of a staircase, under a skylight.

Madonna of the Rocks by DaVinci...is it sad that I wanted to see this for no other reason than it was in The DaVinci Code?

The sea of people waiting to see this little painting.

 And on to the Mona Lisa we went! And it kept getting more crowded, and more crowded, and more crowded the closer we got...

Please don't yell at me, but there were other paintings that Eric and I found much more impressive in person...But alas, we saw the Mona Lisa! Because you just have to when you're in Paris, right?

Meanwhile, Eric did a lot of this...

and this...

And this.

Once we saw everything we wanted to see, we roamed around aimlessly taking it all in for a couple of hours. As we were leaving, we realized that we somehow walked right by The Raft of the Medusa, which Eric really wanted to see. So we trekked back up to the second floor, and I'm glad we did, because it was beautiful. The size of it alone was impressive. You can see how small Eric looked standing next to it...

We headed over to see the inverted pyramid, bought some prints, and then headed out to grab a bite to eat before Notre Dame!

I gave up on trying to get anything more than a snapshot of this, hence the girl posing, and some lady's kid resting on the pyramid. Oh, people.

A quick bite to eat, and another delightful espresso to go, and we were off to Notre Dame!