My own Davinci Code

As part of my continued European exploits, I made my first visit to The Louvre in Paris. For those of you unfamiliar with The Louvre (which means you have lived in a cave for the last 400 years), it is the largest art museum in the world. It's enormous; I read that it is over 3 miles to walk around the entire museum. That being said, it is impossible to view the entire museum in one day, or even one week.

Since I know I couldn't see the entire museum (though it would be fun to run through the gallery, keeping score of how many unsuspecting children I could knock down along the way), I decided to see the important stuff - which really means Davinci's Mona Lisa.

The people at The Louvre must realize that most people just want to see Mona Lisa, and get the hell outta there (especially American tourists). To help people accomplish that with great difficulty, they placed the popular artwork on a wall in a distant room on the third floor of one of the halls. Yes, they force everyone to walk past thousands of works of arts (half of which depicts Jesus in some aspect - those Italians really weren't creative in their subjects).

Fortunately, a picture of Mona Lisa appears on just about every directional sign in the museum, so if you can see, you can find that. (Sorry, blind people.) After walking through 10 different rooms, five staircases, I finally saw a long line of people, cameras in hand, waiting to see Mona.

One would think that the largest art museum in the world could find a separate room to put in the most viewed piece of art in? Nope. Mona List is in a 'regular' room at the museum, along with 200 other paintings, most of which are 2 to 3 times the size of the rather small Davinci painting. And, despite the fact there are over 25 signs that show a camera with a line through it, (the universal 'NO' sign, supposedly), people insisted on taking flash photography of the aging lady, over the screams of "Pas de Photographie!" from the helpless security personnel.

The painting itself, is well, rather unimpressive, at least for all the hype it receives. Honestly, I was disappointed. It's small, not very colorful, and expressionless (Yes, I know that's what it's known for. Duh.).

After waiting in line for 20 minutes for my 10 second glimpse of Mona Lisa, I really didn't know what else to see in the The Louvre... sure, there's lots of great art, but after viewing 2,407 recreations of the crucifixion of Jesus, do I really want to see another painting of it? Without direction, I did what any other person would do - I latched onto a tour group. Of Japanese people, you know, the ones that always huddle together, but are still lead by someone who insists on hold a flag or some stuffed animal on a stick just so you know where to follow? I might not look Japanese, but I figure they would probably stop by all the important stuff, right?


Our ever-so helpful tour guide, Satu Ishikawa, pointing out the headless, armless, female scuplture.

I don't even think they noticed when I joined their group - there were just so many of them, even though I was nearly 6 inches taller than the tallest one. It was fun, I didn't understand a thing, but I got to see the "best of" The Louvre.


The Louvre has beautiful painted ceilings. Here's Sakikama taking a picture of it. I was too busy taking this picture that I forgot to get a picture of the actual ceiling. Oh well.