"I've never seen Jesus in a Speedo before."

Quote from my friend Mari, upon seeing a truly odd 17th-century painting of Jesus wearing what looked like a tropical-print Speedo. (Sadly, I did not get a picture of this.)

View from a window inside. Tiny ant people swarming.

Everyone always says it but it's true-- the Louvre is Huge. Gigantic. Exhaustingly enormous. I was there for 3 or 4 hours and I still think I saw only a tiny fraction of a fraction of the collection. Luckily, that tiny fraction still included lots of works of art that I've studied in my various art history classes. It was mind-blowing to see the scale of some of these works, especially ones like The Coronation of Napoleon (erm, might not be the exact title...) by David.

Look at the person for scale.

We went with some friends who were visiting from Berlin who wanted to "see what people come to the Louvre to see," so we also made the obligatory stop to see the Mona Lisa. Going to see the Mona Lisa is funny, there are lots of signs with just the picture and an arrow pointing in the semi-right direction and then as you begin approaching the room there are lots of signs warning about pickpockets. The thing about the Mona Lisa is, everyone always says it's so much smaller than you would think, but it's really not. It's totally a normal portrait-sized painting. Because the smallness had been so hyped up, it was actually bigger than I thought it would be.

The crowd was more interesting than the painting.

Saucy Odalisque. Can't believe I got to see her in person!

Really amazing cup made out of some sort of stone.

Maybe the best thing about being a kinda-sort-well-at-least-I-have-an-ID-card-that-says-so French student is that I can get into pretty much every museum for free. I get to see all this stuff for free! Anytime I want!

This privilege is extended to students in other EU countries as well, which my friends in Berlin kinda-sorta are. So, in anticipation of tough French ticket takers, we tried to teach them how to say "I am a German student" in French (JE SUIS ETUDIANT ALLEMAGNE JE SUIS ETUDIANT ALLEMAGNE) but they still got stopped. And questioned. And required to show passports and visas. Finally one of my friends just sort of shoved his German police papers (??!) at the lady, all flustered, and that finally let them through. (Apparently you have to register with the police when you move to Berlin. You might have more questions, so do I. But alas, that is the extent of my knowledge.)

FIN