Monday 15th – Week 1 – The Louvre, Opera and Place Vendome

Being awake at 5am, we were able to hear the heavens open as Paris got a massive down pour. By the time we had finished breakfast, it was still pouring down, so we headed off to the Louvre – a day for indoor activities. Despite half a dozen trips to Paris, we'd never been to the Louvre, so good to be onto something new. To our amazement the queues that the Louvre is famous for had decided to form late today, so we went straight in and purchased tickets without any delay.

We spent the next four hours walking the halls of the Louvre looking at gallery after gallery of mainly French paintings. During our visit, we got plenty of opportunities to observe the day outside and to see that the weather was not improving and that the queues were now about 400m long and wrapping round the courtyard from the pyramid. The Louvre itself, apart from all the artwork, is an amazing building – from the intricate carving and sculpture on the outside, to the magnificent glass ceilinged courtyards and the elaborate decoration on the walls and ceilings in some of the galleries. All the queues that had been braving the elements outside had to go somewhere and sure enough, they all headed for the Mona Lisa, so by the time we got there it was absolute bedlam with thousands of people thronging in the halls and corridors around it. We took a brief look into Salle 6, where the picture is fortunately housed high on a wall and got to within 20 feet of it, but that was more than enough for us, so we retreated to the corridors nearby it for some of the most beautiful internal decoration in the entire building.

No matter how good the museum or art gallery, 4 hours is about my limit, so after that we headed on a walking tour of some of the swankier shopping streets in Paris around Place Vendome and the Opera. On our way we encountered the current tourist scam. A person walking towards you bends down and picks up a gold ring, which he offers to you, as if it's yours and you've lost it. I'm not sure what happens if you accept it, whether its a decoy to rob you of your wallet or if the demand a reward for a worthless ring, but nonetheless we've seen it a dozen times in the last few days, although nobody seems fooled by it. Ignoring the clown offering the ring seems to do the trick.