New Years’ Eve we got a late start. today was the day we were going to spend in the Louvre and had seen on the website that they are open til 9:30 on saturdays. so we didn’t set out until about noon or so and looked for a place to eat lunch. we had noticed a creperie in our arrondissement (neighborhood or district) and had actually tried to go there for dinner the night before, which would have been way better than the crappy German food, but they were closing for the night when we got there. most places in Paris work on a fixed price menu where you get an appetizer, an entree (or plat to them as entree means appetizer in French), and a dessert. at this place you got a salad, a salty crepe, a sweet crepe, and a jug of cidre for 9 euros a piece. pretty good deal, i think. the salad was pretty tasty and then sarah and i both had a ham and cheese crepe for our main course. then she had a butter and sugar with lemon juice crepe (which she says was “SOOO good!”) and i had an apple crepe which was excellent. our waiter was really nice. he didn’t speak much English but he tried really hard and kept apologizing to us for not speaking clearly enough which was very interesting to me after hearing that the French hate to speak English and are snobby about it when they have to. but that was not the case with this guy and that was very encouraging to us.

after our lunch we headed to the center of the city to go to the Louvre. the day before we had seen all the bookstands along the Seine River, but they were all locked up and unmanned because it was so cold. this day, however, it was warmer and a good many of them were open. so we decided to walk along the river and browse the various selling stations before heading to the museum since we had until 9:30 to go through it. a lot of the stuff was pretty cheap and we got a nice charcoal drawing of Notre Dame done by a local artist for something ridiculous like 2 or 3 euros. definitely a bargain. after a good amount of walking among the street vendors we started to head over to the museum about 2:45.

so remember when i said that we knew we had until 9:30? well apparently all publications and websites failed to mention that the Louvre would be closing early on New Years’ Eve because of some gala that they were having there. it was now 3:00pm and the museum would be closing at 5:00pm, and they would start moving people out of the galleries between 4:30 and 4:45. so in the biggest museum in the world, we had about an hour and a half to go through it. utterly impossible and just plain stupid to art critics across the globe, i’m sure. forgive my blasphemy, but an hour and a half was enough time for me. i probably would have preferred at least 2 hours, but i saw everything i wanted to see in the small amount of time that we had there. overall, i was pretty underimpressed with teh Louvre. at least the art that was there. i’m just not a big fan of the “grand master” painters and much prefer the Impressionists and later. but all the same, it was fun to see really famous works of art that i’ve only studied in school. that’s not to say that i didn’t enjoy the Louvre, like i said i saw everything i wanted to see, i just didn’t find it to live up to its hype that i’ve heard all my life.

my favorite pieces in the museum were not even paintings. the Louvre has several Babylonian gates that i was VERY excited to see. i was not really prepared for them to be as big as they were and was quite taken aback when i entered the room that housed them. they were probably about 15 feet tall and much more detailed and intricate than i had remembered from pictures, even more amazing since they are over 2500 years old. as i stood in their shadows looking at them, i could imagine them back in Babylon standing over Ezekiel and other prophets as they prophesied against Babylon. aside from the ancient Mesopatamian artifacts, i also wanted to see the ancient Egyptian exhibits. the Louvre has the normal Egyptian stuff, sarcophagi, death masks, obelisks, etc, but it’s always cool to see stuff that is that old.

of course there are the Louvre “staples” that everyone must see when they visit the museum and that, of course, everyone flocks to. the first one we came across was the famous Nike of Samothrace. situated at the top of a set of stairs, Nike is beautifully placed. pictures simply do not do this statue justice. it is more beautiful than i had imagined and we stood looking at her (and being bumped around a good bit by other tourists) for a good number of minutes. the second staple we really had no intention of seeing and just sort of happened to come across her as we were looking for other things. this, of course, is the famous Venus de Milo, another very beautiful statue. we then made our way to the Grand Gallery, a very long hallway containing the museum’s collection of Italian paintings, including the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa. having just finished Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (total rubbish, by the way, in content, scholarship, and composition) the day before we left for France, the Grand Gallery was very fun to stand in.

as we walked down the gallery i made a game out of trying to remember which works i had studied and then we came to “the room”. everyone always says how different the Mona Lisa looked from what they expected, usually citing how small it is. i had heard this so many times that i pretty much expected the painting to be like an 8×10 or something. so i guess i am probably one of the very few people who was actually surprised by how big it is! i guess, with it being the most famous painting in the world, people expect it to be this massive painting that covers an entire wall of the museum or something. if so, i can see how it would be surprising that the Mona Lisa is only about 30×20. i was amazed at how beautiful the painting is. with such a cultural icon, i think a lot of its wonder is lost through seeing it so many times in so many different ways, be it in art books or through commercial gimmicks. but it’s just a beautiful and wonderful painting that definitely deserves all the talk that it gets. again with reference to Dan Brown’s book, it was funny to hear someone actually say “she really DOES look like she knows a secret” followed by their friend’s “you’re right, she DOES. interesting.” again, i say, rubbish! but funny, nonetheless.

the museum was soon closing so we made our way from the Grand Gallery back toward the pyramid entrance and made a small stop at the museum shop. we then headed to the Carrousel shopping center attached to the museum to see what was there. as we entered the mall, we saw another very amusing site. there it was. the blade and the chalice (again a reference to The Da Vinci Code). if you haven’t read the book, “the blade and the chalice” is a large inverted glass pyramid hanging from the ceiling (the chalice) with its point nearly touching the point of a cement pyramid coming out of the cement floor of the ground (the blade). this location is said to be the (ficticious) resting place of the “real” (ficticious) Holy Grail, a set of (ficticious) documents guarded by the (ficticious) Priory of Sion which contain the (ficticious) genealogy of Jesus Christ, who was (ficticiously) married to Mary Magdalene and had a (ficticious) daughter with her. the blade and chalice seemed to be a point of pilgrimmage for many visitors to Paris as there were as many people around this site waiting to take pictures and touch it as there were around the three “staples” of the Louvre.

after having a good laugh at this, we made our way up to the food court of the mall to have dinner. this food court was unlike American food courts. i guess this was the French equivalent of “fast food”, but it was still quite expensive and still in the “fixed price” fashion (i guess our “combo meals” are sort of a fixed price kind of thing). we found the cheapest place, a hamburger joint where a drink, fries, and burger cost 8 euros (a little over $10). it was…..decent, definitely not worth what we paid, but still filled our bellies.

after dinner, we walked for a while and made our way to the end of the Champs D’Elysees, the Place D’Concorde, where an Egyptian obelisk stands to mark the place of guillotine beheadings during the French Revolution. people were starting to gather here (even at 7pm) for New Years’ Eve festivities, and it was already starting to get rowdy. we were pretty tired from being on our feet all day, plus it had started to drizzle (miserable, slow rain. the worst kind), so we decided to make our way back to our hotel and enjoy a nice New Years’ Eve inside. plus, we figured that the festivities would be featured on tv, so we could watch them there. when we got back to our hotel it was about 8pm, so we read for a little while and then turned on the tv to experience French television. after skimming channels we found a French variety show where the hosts were all dressed formally and figured that this would be a good candidate to show New Years’ festivities (we figured there would at least be fireworks at the Eiffel Tower) when the time came. the show was pretty funny. it had magicians, acrobats, and other various kinds of acts.

midnight came….and nothin. no changing to live coverage of downtown Paris or anything. so we searched channels again. we found London’s festivities, Berlin’s, Amsterdam’s, Madrid’s, Moscow’s. but not Paris’!! in Paris, there was no coverage of anything going on in Paris to ring in the New Year. this was quite curious. even the next morning (during our five minutes of internet time), i couldn’t find any pictures of anything that went on in Paris. strange. apparently, however, there were more vehicle burnings and mild rioting, though most appeared to be in Paris suburbs as opposed to the center city, so we were quite content with our decision to stay in instead of braving the revelry in a foreign place. hardly believing that it was now 2006, we went to sleep.