Paris, Day 3: The Louvre

Another delicious breakfast today, although, sadly, there were no almond croissants. We did finally meet the mother and daughter who are staying in the third bedroom--Kelly and Samantha, from St. Louis.

John and I went to the internet cafe after breakfast, where I was able to upload the first two blog entries in the queue (Rome, Day 4 and Pompeii & Naples).

When we got back to the apartment and got ready to leave for the day, Beth discovered that she had left her purse at last night's restaurant. Fortunately, the restaurant was just opening for the day, and they had her purse safe and sound. Nothing too valuable in it, but it was her Italian purse, and had her camera with all of her photos. Whew!

We strolled down the river towards the Louvre in a leisurely fashion. Once we arrived, we took a few photos in the Cour Carrée, then headed downstairs to Le Carrousel de Louvre for lunch and a quick wifi fix at the Apple Store. John also bought an Airport Express, in hopes of fixing Carol's internet problems. For lunch, I had French "fast food": quiche lorraine, a green salad, and a Coke Light from the food court. The rest of the family opted for Big Macs and fries.

The Louvre is another amazing museum that's not possible to see in one day, or even one week. We started by visiting the Egyptian antiquities section, since we had missed those sections in both Vatican City and Naples.



Next, we went through Oriental Antiquities. I really liked the mosaics from the reign of Darius I (whom Matt tells me was a Persian king):



Beth liked the column heads from the same era:



Here's a detail of the Code of Hammurabi:



A little Limosin portrait:



One of the many stairways in the palace:



The Hall of Rubens:



A door:



Bronzino's La Sainte Familie:



I love how the "no food or drink" pictographs represent food with a baguette:



We took the Metro back, and stopped for our daily ice cream. This time we tried a different shop on our street, one that had a few more flavors. I had caramel beurre sale, Matt had caramel and dark chocolate, Beth had mandarin and pink grapefruit, and John and peach and dark chocolate.

Once we got back, we finally got Carol's wireless working by adding the Airport Express to the network. We are still mystified by some of the boxes: what we think are the cable modem and the router each have a secondary white box between them and their power supplies, with Ethernet connections coming out of both. We thought that the router was dead, and bypassing it would fix things, but the Airport and modem don't work unless the router is connected between them! Essentially, it works now, but we have no idea why...

For dinner, we opted to get some sandwiches. John and I had chicken on baguette, Matt had roast beef on a baguette, and Beth had salmon crudites. We shared a brownie and a coffee eclair--yum!