The Lourve, Notre Dame, and the Riverboat Tour

Blog Entry Three: The Lourve, Notre Dame, and the Riverboat Tour

                Today we visited the Lourve, which is famous for the Mona Lisa, a name I’d be surprised that someone didn’t recognize. I learned the Lourve was actually a castle at one point, but the king moved out of it because it was in the middle of Paris, which wasn’t safe for him, as there was a revolution going on. The place was gigantic. According to our tour guide, if you stopped to look at every painting for 16 seconds, it would take years to have seen every one. Now of course it didn’t seem like that on the inside, as we were rushed and were only interested in seeing some selected paintings, but that’s nonetheless impressive.

                We entered through a glass pyramid in the courtyard, which was quite cool. Inside the place was massive, with three separate wings all full of paintings and sculptures and whatnot. Some classmates and I were rushing through the place looking for the Mona Lisa and the Crowning of Napoleon, so we did not stop to thoroughly examine most of the paintings, but from what I saw, the majority of them were religious. While looking for the Crowning of Napoleon, we ended up finding the Mona Lisa. I had not known before then that it was such a small painting, but what I heard of it was true; no matter where you were, it looked like she was staring at you. That was actually quite freaky.

                In the end, we actually ended up going to find food and a place to sit, as we were all tired from walking, but nonetheless the Lourve was impressive. Which brings us to our next destination, Notre Dame. Notre Dame, in my honest opinion, wasn’t that great. We had visited a church earlier that was ten times more interesting, but Notre Dame was still pretty cool. The inside, of course, was massive, with pillars and arches and stain glass windows. Although the line to get in was a couple hundred feet long, and there were easily 500+ people in the line, we got in surprisingly fast. After only about 20 minutes, we were in the front of the line. I was honestly very surprised about that.

                Later, our half insane tour director guided us to the dock where we’d be taking our riverboat tour. The riverboat tour actually changed my entire view of Paris. There was something about it, seeing Paris at night from the boat, that just made Paris seem… Better. Before the tour, I hadn’t really liked it much. It was dirty and rather boring. Maybe I just liked London too much and that made my opinion biased. Regardless, seeing all the buildings, and the lights, and the people lined up on the river was just absolutely serene. It was on the boat where I realized how beautiful Paris was really, something that I had failed to see before. Admittedly I didn’t pay much attention to the audio part of the tour itself. I preferred sitting there, listening to music and taking in the beautiful sight of Paris at night.