Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Mayhem at the Louvre

We visited the Louvre museum yesterday. It apparently receives 5 million visitors each year. It felt like 3 million of them visited the same day we did. The picture shows the crush of people in the entry under the giant glass pyramid. Note: this is just people waiting to buy tickets to get in! Definitely not the place for people with fear of crowds, or ambulatory problems: we walked for 2 hours and barely covered the wings on ancient greek and italian figurines, paintings and drawings.
I'll post more pix later showing how big this place is. But the art and buildings really do give you an amazing sense of history: the Louvre itself opened in 1793! More info and pix of their holdings here: http://www.louvre.fr/llv/musee/institution.jsp?bmLocale=en.
Favorite moment: the look on the face of two frazzled parents as they realized that, after a long wait in line and who knows how long getting to the museum, the amassed art at hand was less interesting to their two young kids than running and sliding across the marble floors on their knees. :-)

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