France 2006

I worked the early shift on Wednesday. Jeff and Ray slept in until noon again. (Jerks.) After work we went to lunch, I took a short nap, and then we went to the Louvre.

Since they had tried to go chronologically the day before, I tried to drag them around the Louvre at a faster pace so that they could see the most famous sights. We started with sculpture, and spent way too long on it. We saw almost the entire sculpture collection at the Louvre, which took us about 3 hours. Among other famous pieces we saw the Prisoners by Michaelangelo (1475-1564) and the Venus de Milo and The Victory (which aren't in the sculpture collection, but they are sculptures).

One of the coolest things we saw while going through the Louvre was a huge storage room. We couldn't go inside, but we could see down into it from the staircase and the floors above. It was fascinating to see the mysteriously shrouded masterpieces down there stacked all together. What's in there? Later I was telling a guy who works for Hasbro France about my experience. He said that he had worked at both the Louvre and Musee D'Orsay as a young man, and that I would be amazed at what the museums have in their collections that are not on display. He said that the Louvre has a collection of sex toys going back to ancient times. They don't show them because of their lewd subject matter.

We took a break since we had overdosed on sculpture. We had a coffee and a crepe again. After the break we ran around the museum trying to see the rest of the famous stuff before it closed. We saw the Mona Lisa, the Madonna of the Rocks, the Coronation of Napolean, Liberty Leading the People, and some of my favorites: The Raft of Medusa and the Drowned Martyr.

We finished up the evening touring Napolean III's apartment. It was amazingly opulent and really cool to see.