The second morning in Paris was a little more relaxed with no reservation time to meet and a little more knowledge of the city we took our time walking from our flat to the Louvre. On the way there we stopped by a bakery and picked up another freshly baked croissant and snacked on it for the rest of our walk.
We got to the museum before it opened and there was a good lined formed already, and i had planned to go through the mall as all the guidebooks say, but i had no idea where the mall was in relation to the quad of the main entrance. We gave up and stood and line, and it wasn’t really that bad once they started letting people in, and it just happened to be the bag check that took a long time and once you were down stairs there were plenty of machines to buy your ticket and just walk into the galleries.
Once inside we headed straight to the Mona Lisa since again all the guidebooks said that the Mona Lisa would be busy. The Mona Lisa is pretty deep inside of the Museum and on the way there we passed by one of the other Big 3 of the museum that was on my list to see, the Winged Victory of Samothrace which was probably my favorite of the 3.
After a few more turns and another long hallway of paintings we made it to the Mona Lisa. It was nice being there early with only one row of people in front of the painting. It only took a second to make it to the very front and center to take a picture and i even went back to the side to actually really look at it more closely.
I was surprised by a few things once we got there. First the room where the painting lives is HUGE, basically the size of a small warehouse, and most pictures of the crowds i see seem like the painting is in a hallway with no where to move. To get a sense of the size of the room, this painting sits on the opposite wall of the Mona Lisa. The second this is that the painting was bigger than i expected. My sister made it out to me that it was like 8×11, but really its a typically poster size.
The major piece of the Louvre that we needed to see was the Venus De Milo. Unfortunately multiple Asian tour groups got there before us and were swarming around it like obnoxious bees talking loudly and trying take self shot pictures with it. We didn’t want to get associated with them so we looked, shot and moved on.
We lingered around another 30 minutes or so mainly around the other greek sculptures but decided to skip some of the other wings of the museum for another trip to Paris.
