Monday should have been easy, because we visited only two places … right? Hah! Those two places were the Orangerie and the Louvre, with a pleasant stroll through the Tuileries in-between. By dinner time we were exhausted and our feet hurt. But by golly we sure did see a lot of amazing art!
I'll post no photos for this day. All the photos I took have Marie in them (which would ruin my efforts at anonymization). And you can look up online a better image of the Mona Lisa than I got with my crappy phone-camera. (My picture shows Marie standing next to the painting, but the Mona Lisa itself is blurry.)
I was struck in the Orangerie by an unexpected realization. I think I may have mentioned before that Wife and I took a trip to Paris in the summer of 2007, just a few months before I started this blog. That week may have been the high point of our marriage together, in fact. Among other places, we visited the Orangerie. We saw the grand Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet. And in the ensuing years I totally forgot about it! When I booked this visit for Marie and myself, I had no idea what to expect; in fact, I was certain that I had never been there before. I continued to believe that right up until I walked into the first large, oval room and saw the murals … and then the memory struck me all at once. I have no idea why I'd forgotten them. But when we walked out a couple hours later to walk to the Louvre, I told Marie about it. And I warned her, "Be sure to park these memories somewhere in your mind where you can find them again!"
And the Louvre? We spent five hours there. We were completely beat by the time we left. We saw lots of amazing stuff. But I didn't keep a list of what we saw, and even if I had you wouldn't care. It was a lot of Great Art: let's leave it at that.
Oh, and in the middle of the afternoon an alarm went off, and an announcement told us all to leave the building. For several minutes we were squeezed by the crowd into a stairwell where our part of the crowd was trying to go down, while others below us called that the doors were locked and we had to go up instead till we could find another exit. Fortunately the alarm stopped before anything bad happened. I checked with a guard whether we were still supposed to leave anyway, and he said No.
We slept well that night.
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