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Eurotrip Day 6 – Paris

Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 10:17 pm # Categorized under Animals, Artistic, Cityscape, Food, Landscape, People, Travel

There was no sleeping in this morning as it was the first Sunday of May! What does that mean? It means that all the major museums in Paris will have a long line-up waiting the visitors as there’s free admission!

We knew that we wanted to spend quite a few hours (and ended up being most of the day) at the Louvre since it is massive in size, not to mention that it holds some of the world’s most famous paintings, including the Mona Lisa. We had also hoped to visit a portion of Musée d’Orsay.

We departed the temporary hostel we were staying at 8am and had to make our way to our originally booked hotel to put down all our baggage. After a short breakfast at a local bakery, we headed towards the Musée du Louvre.

Arriving train at the Oberkampf station, and first time seeing that you need to open the train door yourself if you want to get on or off!

Showing us getting off the train at Voltaire station and working our way to the exit! Definitely not the longest distance we’ve travelled through a train station…

And they were right! The secondary entrance (if you don’t mind not going in from the main pyramid) took less than 20 minutes. Not bad! We wanted to get to the most famous paintings and sculptures first, so we walked towards our first one, the Mona Lisa :-P

For those that haven’t been to the Louvre, the Mona Lisa painting is hung on its own special wall, in a large room. To get to it, you have to walk through the Italian Paintings hall and find your way to the room. You can’t miss it – everywhere you go, you see her face on the walls with directions leading to it.

This was a shot from the hallway, about 50m away from the wall. The sheer amount of people in there with their electronic devices is incredible! I guess this is art in itself ;-)

To get to this position requires about 10 minutes. You have to sort of move slowly up to the wall. Once up there, you get “one shot” and that’s it – before you are escorted out of the area (to keep it moving). There was this woman that apparently wanted to stretch her luck. After taking a shot of the painting and had to move out, she ran past the guards and posed – supposedly wanted her friends to take a photo for her. Needless to say, she was escorted out of the area by 3 guards, haha.

Fortunately for me I had the telephoto and already took a “few shots”. I also did what every visitor does – a photo of me and the painting :-P The Mona Lisa is behind a big bullet proof glass – apparently there’s been many attempts to ruin it before.

And of course, I just “had to” take this shot – even though it’s all over Google Images. A funny thing happened here – one of the security guards saw me with my telephoto lens and opened her eyes wide and said “Oh my god!” (since most other people had small digicams). After my “one shot” she kept me moving, haha.

Here it is in operation!

We got there shortly after 5pm, which was the cut-off time for the last entrance. :-(

Sorry that I have to end off this post with a series of food photos :-P We decided to sit down for fine dining tonight. They had an entrée + dessert for 19 Euros! Awesome meal!

For those of you who don’t know what this dish is, this is Escargot, or simply, snails. It’s served with parsley butter. I had this dishes many years ago and loved it, and it was on my to-eat list here. We split 2 plates and each had 3, it was just awesome.

To be continued…