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I spent my birthday in the Louvre today. There’s a metro stop right under it, in which you can see the original foundation walls from when it was a fortress:

A view from underneath the big glass pyramid:

Just like the British Museum, the Louvre is not to be seen in a day. I reckon it would take at least a week to see everything. Hell, its collection comprises the ancient world through about 1850! Therefore, I followed the self-guided tour in the Rick Steves’ Paris guidebook and went for the highlights.

Here’s Venus de Milo - a perfect study of opposites and balance:

The Winged Victory of Samothrace:

The little dark square in the middle is the Mona Lisa - notice how she gets her own wall:

The closer you get to the room in which the Mona Lisa is displayed, the more crowded it gets.

I managed to get up to the roped area, which keeps the public about twenty or so feet away from The Painting. I took a good long look at it. Even under glass, it’s a magnificent painting. I remember studying this painting in art history classes in college – the triangular solidity of the figure, the depth of the background landscape, the way the eyes follow you no matter where you are in the room, the hint of a smile. The significance of these elements doesn’t quite come through in a photograph. You get it when you see it with your own eyes.

I saw several people making copies of paintings:

As long as the copy isn’t the same size as the original, you can make as exact a reproduction as you like.

Nothing in the museum cafés interested me, so I wandered down to the food court for lunch instead. It’s organized by region – Asian, Greek, Italian, Mediterranean, etc. I went for the latter and had salmon, rice, hummus, and grilled zucchini.

There’s a post office in the Louvre, which seemed logical, not to mention handy. Imagine how many postcards are sent from there!

I was dismayed to find an Apple store and a Virgin megastore in the museum. No getting away from them, I guess.

The Opéra Garnier is about a 15-minute walk from the Louvre. Along the way, I stopped in at a sheet music shop. It was dim and musty-smelling inside. Flipping through wooden bin after wooden bin of cello sheet music, most of which was notated in French or German, felt like being in a record store in the 80s. Nothing really caught my eye, so I didn’t buy any sheet music, but I was glad to know that a shop like that could still exist in the modern day. At least in Paris, it can. It probably couldn’t in the US.

In its day, the Opéra Garnier was the rich people’s opera house:

The theater inside isn’t all that big, but the halls and stairways surrounding it are quite spacious and ornately decorated:


It was more important to see and be seen than it was to hear and see the performance on stage.

Unless you’re with a tour group, you can’t get into the lower level of the theater. However, a few of the upper boxes are open, so I went into one, leaned a little over the balcony of it and looked up to see this:

Seriously, click for big on this one.

Marc Chagall painted the pieces for the ceiling in 1964. Beautiful, isn’t it? Chagall lived in Paris for awhile. He moved there in 1910 and studied the work of other artists. He went back to Russia in 1914, and then returned to France in 1923. He only just made it out of France again in 1941 when Germany took control of it. The more I see of Chagall's paintings, the more they grow on me.

I had some trouble finding the nearby metro station. I had a couple of maps with me, and they both indicated that the metro station was just to the left of the opera house. In fact, it’s directly in front of it, and not marked with any sort of sign. I only managed to find it because I sat on the steps of the opera house and just observed people for about 10 minutes. I noticed people disappearing down steps in the cul-de-sac in front of the opera house and so went to investigate. Had I still not found it, I would have resorted to asking the nearest friendly-looking Parisian, “Ou est le metro?”