We woke to the sounds of birds at 6am and the dawning of a massive hangover. Still, we rose to the challenge, a little tentatively, but as tenacious as anyone who has spent 25 hours travelling to be somewhere for a week. We took the metro, no hitches, we're experts at the metro, except when the ticket machine is out of order or the ticket you buy doesn't validate.
We have 'no queue' Paris Museum passes but so did the 100 people in front of us. Oh well, once you're through the door the building opens up into dazzling light, space, corridors, escalators and pathways in every direction. I really appreciated the beauty of the Louvre architecture this time, it is elegant, seductive, lavish, regal and full of surprises. So why do they have such bewildering maps?
Most early visitors head straight for the big ticket items -the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Raft of the Medusa, Ingre's Turkish baths. We lucked out and went straight to the new temporary exhibition The Treasury of the Abbey of St Maurice d'Agaune, a stunning collection of medieval treasures from a Swiss Abbey which has been intact for over 1,000 years.
We weren't allowed to take photos unfortunately. I have never seen photos of the treasures or seen anything like them. There were intensely blue glass urns and vases covered in gold filigree and precious jewels, silver reliquaries with the carved surface narrating the story of the saint in great detail, St Maurice on his horse, in chain mail, and the horse wearing an elaborate mantle, all in the finest silverware, right down to his
pointed shoes in the stirrups.
We saw lots of other things, some of the most amazing not even labelled, like a vast bronze portal, primitive, elaborate and impossible to even begin to classify. By this stage people were bumping into each other, tour groups scrambling to get in front of the best art works before another group beat them to it, hundreds of cameras going off at once, people everywhere puzzling over their maps ... Still, as planned, we got to see Michelangelo's Dying Slaves. One of them was absolutely beautiful, with muscles both young and tired, tense and resigned, it could possibly be his most beautiful and emotive work.
We finally escaped after three and a half hours. You could spend a week there and still not see everything. But I think you'd need to lie down in a dark room for a few days afterwards. We were thrilled with what we carried away and really enjoyed our simple picnic lunch in the Luxemburg Gardens afterwards.
We went to the Laundromat in the afternoon and met a lovely American girl who gave us soap powder and showed us how to work the machines (thank you whoever you are), knowledge we then shared with the little old Japanese couple and the young hipster dude. So much fun and clean clothes too. Later we walked to Eglise saint-Germain des Pres which is the only Romanesque church in Paris. Only the bell tower and entrance are Romanesque and the rest is an early Gothic add on. It was peaceful, dim and old, a good place to sit quietly for a while. We went to a Japanese restaurant for dinner again. Japanese restaurants in Paris are even better than in Japan because you can drink French wine with your Yakitori, such a good combination.
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