Outside in the park, Inside the Grand Gallery

Saturday May 14th

Today was a nice outdoor kind of day. A little on the cool side if you sit in the shade, but if you kept moving, it was a really great day to be outside.  And keep moving we did. By the end of the day, we had walked over nine miles.  Today’s main activity was letterboxing in the big Bois de Boulogne Park.   We had been to this park once before, but hadn’t seen that much of it. It’s 2.5 times larger than Central Park, and letterboxing would give us an opportunity to explore it from end to end.

We started at one edge of the park where there is a kid’s activity region.  You have to pay about $5 to get into the area, but it has really nice playgrounds, a water play area, pony rides, picnic grounds, kiddie rides and some bigger rides that you need tickets for, and a small farm area with lots of animals to see.  It was really fun to walk around and Katie loved the animals, particularly the little lambs.

We bought some tickets and ride on the Wave Swinger ride, which we both love, and the spinning teacups which Katie loves.  After our experience with the spinning teacups at Disneyland Paris where the ride went slowly and barely spun, this set of teacups was a surprise.  They were the fastest teacups we have ever been on. I had to beg Katie to slow down.  The world was spinning so fast and all I could concentrate on was her face. “Why are you looking at me so strangely Mommy?”  “Because if I don’t I’m going to get so dizzy I am going to fall over,” I replied. Luckily I survived without getting sick or falling over upon exiting the teacup.

There were a couple of other cool rides including a go-kart path using bumper cars, and a fun looking ride where Carousel horses were freed from the carousel and instead went around a track like the old fashioned cars at Hershey park. Katie would have loved that when she was smaller.

We had a lot of fun here, but couldn’t find the letterbox.  The directions referenced leaving the farm area and turning right. However, there were four or five exits from the mini-farm and we couldn’t match up any of the clues.  Later we found out that the farm in the clue was not in this park, but in another park  cross-town. Oh well.  We still had fun. At least we know why the clues didn’t match up!

We left the kid area “Jardin des Acclimations” and went out into the wider park.  There are two big lakes, Lake Inferior (which is bigger) and Lake Superior (which is smaller). Don’t ask me why. There are a lot of nice hiking trails near the lakes with lots of streams running this way and that. We ran into quite a few dogs swimming, two turtles and some sets of ducklings. At one point we saw a big lab swimming in Lake Inferior trying to chase down an entire flock of duck who where quacking at him very loudly and staying just out of his reach.   We hiked for a while and found the second letterbox in a nice quiet wooded area.

The third letterbox was listed as status uncertain but we went after it anyway, since it was near a waterfall we wanted to see. No letterbox, but the waterfall was pretty.  Afterwards we rested on the shores of Lake Superior and read until the sun went behind a cloud and we got chilly.

We then caught the metro to the Tuileries and had dinner in the gardens there.  We wanted to be near the Louvre, because it was the “Night of European Museums” where museums all across Europe were open past midnight all evening/night hours were free.  We thought this would be a great opportunity to go back to the Louvre and see some different sections.

We showed up at the Louvre around 5:30 and the line to get in through the glass pyramid was huge.  We turned around, went into the nearby metro stop and into the Louvre through the attached underground mall with no waiting.  As Katie put it, “I’m so glad that no one else reads the tips in their guidebooks!!”

The museum has three large wings once you are inside: the Dendron, the Sully and the Richeliu. We tried to enter through the Dendron wing, which is the main wing, but the guard told us it wasn’t free until 6pm, so we settled down to wait.  We looked at the map and decided we wanted to see the ancient Egypt section.   The access is better to that section through the Sully wing so we walked over there.  Lo and behold, that guard gate was abandoned so we walked right in 20 minutes early. Score!

The ancient Egypt wing was really incredible, and actually a lot more fun to see than the normal Louvre highlights.  There were 30 rooms full of exquisite antiquities from all the different Egyptian dynasties. We’ve seen a lot of Egyptian artifacts at different museums, and this one was better than even the great collection at the Met in NY, except the Met has the full Temple, which this one did not.  Some things we had never seen before though were some hieroglyphic panels in full color, without any fading of the paint, and hieroglyphic writing, not on clay tablets, but on papyrus leaves!  How have those lasted so many years??

There were about two dozen cat mummies, ibis mummies, crocodile mummies and other animals. An interesting aside - Katie pointed out that nile crocodile and nil crocodil (pronounced “neel crocodeel”) rhymes in both English and French. I don’t like seeing human mummies in museums, I think it is disrespectful, but the animal mummies were interesting. 

Part of the Egyptian wing was closed and the antiquities were relocated temporarily into rooms in the Louvre that were original palace rooms.  It was very disconcerting seeing the Egyptian artifacts in these crazy Renaissance rooms. 

It took us just over an hour to make our way through the 30 Egyptian rooms, and we weren’t quite ready to go yet, so we decided to go walk the length of the Grand Gallery.  We only went through half of it last time, and wanted to do the whole thing so off we set.  Upon reaching the Grand Gallery it was much less crowded than last time we were there, so it was a nice time to walk, browse and take photos.  The religious art shown here is in my opinion less interesting than the room itself. 

I decided that I wanted to lay on the floor in the Grand Gallery like the Vetruvian man in homage to the Da Vinci code, and have Katie take my photo.  “But the Vetruvian man is NAKED!’ she whispered.  Once I assured her that I intended to keep my clothes on, she assented to take the photo. However she was still a bit concerned that you aren’t allowed to just lie down on the floor in the Grand Gallery and I would either make a scene or get in trouble.  So we found a rather quiet alcove still in the gallery, with the guards just out of sight.  I handed her my bag, she got the camera ready and I laid down.  She snapped the photo and I hopped up.  However, I wasn’t happy with the first photo and made her do it again.

It was a lot of fun and I felt slightly rebellious – I know - so crazy of me to lie down on the floor in the Grand Gallery!  I asked Katie if she wanted to do it and she quickly said no.  We walked on a bit, me laughing at the photo and how much fun it was to take.  I asked Katie again and she somewhat reluctantly said yes she would do it.  So we walked the length of the gallery, walked back to the alcove and took Katie’s Vetruvian man photo too!  

We finished up the night with a quick visit to the Mona Lisa who is just off the Grand Gallery.  So few people were taking advantage of this free night at the museum that we were able to simply walk up to the painting and stand right in front of her with no crowds. There were maybe 30 people in front f the painting, a far cry from the hundreds normally lined up.  We stood there for a while looking at her, and I reach the same conclusion as before.  I simply don’t get the appeal.