Musee du Louvre

I saw so many world-famous pieces of art last night, that it still hasn't quite sunk in. I went to the Louvre with Kaylin for the last four hours that it was open because on Friday, after four o'clock, it is free for people under twenty-six years of age. We spent the entire four hours there, took over two-hundred pictures, and I still feel like we only covered a tenth of the entire place. It was incredible. I got to see the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and hundreds of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Etruscan pieces of artwork. I even got to see a mummy! I was very exciting.
Of course, I was most thrilled with the ancient Egypt Exhibit. There were a lot of artifacts and pieces of art that I have only been able to see in photographs since I was a little girl, and I finally got to see them in person! They were everything that I hoped they would be, even if they were different than they looked in the photos. Some of them were much smaller in person than they seemed in photos, and some of them were much bigger and more colorful. They had statues, toys, jewelry, wall carvings and paintings, papyrus scrolls with heiroglyphics written by ancient hands, coffins, sarcophogi, mummified cats and alligators, pottery, everything that would have been used by the ancient Egyptians. I was in HEAVEN! It was so much fun to see all of it in person for once, rather than in books or on the internet. Of course, its always better to see things with your own eyes rather than through someone else's eyes.

We are going back to the Louvre on Sunday because admission is free on Sundays. We have a lot left to see so we will probably going back there every weekend, so that we can get most of the museum in. They say that it takes six weeks or so to go through all of the museum. It really is that big, too. I didn't believe that before I actually when there, but having seen it from the outside and inside, it must be true. It is the largest building I have ever seen in my life! If I were to try to take a picture of the building, I would either have to stand a mile away, or I would have to take a series of ten pictures. The building is shaped like a U, with two wings that must be a half a mile long each. There are two glass pyramids surrounded by fountainst sitting inside the U, one really big and the other one very small. The bigger one is the entrance to the museum. When you enter, you go into the pyramid and down a marble spiral staircase (or there are escalators for those of you lazy bums who would rather have a less climactic entrance into the most famous museum in the world). When you get to the rez-de-chaussee (ground floor, which in this particular case is actually underground, but what can you do), you have three different options for which wing you would like to go down. The one on the right is Denon, which will take you to the Mona Lisa, and the Italian, Spanish and French works of art. The wing straight ahead of you at the entrance is Sully, which houses art of the ancient world; however, the top floor of Sully features French art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The option to your left is Richelieu, which will take you to European art from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

I have so much left to see!