Paris arts and sights (3rd September)

Despite the 2am bedtime this morning, we are up early in order to beat the queues at the Louvre. It opens at 9am and we arrive at 9:15am, breeze through security and getting tickets. We know that Mona Lisa is located in the Denon wing and follow the pictures of her until finally we turn the corner and there she is. In her full A3 size glory - the most famous picture in the world. There are quite a few people here, but we can easily make our way to the centre front for a good look. Thanks to Mum's research for her trip we have downloaded Rick Steves walking tour to our iPods and he tells us a little bit about the features of the painting. Yes her eyes do follow you - but a lot of pictures do that. King Francis I invited Leonardo to his court. He took a few paintings with him, one which was the wife of a wealthy merchant - Lisa Gherardini. When he arrived Francis immediately fell in love with it. You will never quite make out the corners of her mouth, so never knowing if she is smiling, sad, tender, smirking, or just has a knowing look on her face. Even though we are not art lovers it is cool to be able to say that we have seen the real Mona Lisa as up close and personal as the we were allowed to get. Rick Steves also walks us through other parts of the Louvre we see Venus de Milo - the Goddess of Love and Winged Victory a very cool statue amongst other paintings. Despite not being that into art we spend three hours wandering the Louvre taking in the different paintings, sculptures, and other art forms. Mike is most impressed with the Louvre building and the architecture of it. The Louvre was once two palaces and over 300 years succeeding Kings joined the palaces together in 1852 to create the largest building in the world. Outside it has started to rain and it is not very pleasant. We decided to head back to the hostel for lunch and to change from jandals which flick water up the backs of our legs, to shoes which don't. Then it's off to the Charles de Gaulle-Etoile (featuring Arc de Triomphe) to check out the chaos that is the biggest roundabout in France. Shona could spend all day watching the traffic madness. There are 12 roads entering the roundabout which is 8 lanes wide, but there are no lane markings. You give way to traffic coming ONTO the roundabout so the aim is to get into the middle to get around quickly then cut across in front of people to get off. If you stop then you give up your right to go first and have to wait for a gap to go again. We see people in cars, taxis and tour buses or on scooters and road bikes without helmets going around. You can not get insurance for travelling around this piece of road and there is supposedly one accident every 8 minutes. We watched for about an hour and disappointingly didn't see any accidents (we didn't want to see a major one... just a fender bender). We went to the top of the Arch de Triomphe to check out the view and wondered why there weren't more people there. After about 30 minutes we found out why as we were asked to leave. We were confused because it is usually open until 11pm which is correct except on 3rd September (also Mike's Grandad's birthday -Happy Birthday when you read this!) when they have a war veterans parade/celebration to remember those that fought for France and the unknown warrior who is buried below. The Arc de Triomphe was built for the armies to come home through a triumphant arch. So it it is engraved with the names of the veterans who have represented France in the various wars. We were unable to get a good view of the unknown warrior because there were police, men with swords and men with machine guns standing around trying to close the monument to the public. It was great though because the roundabout became absolute chaos as the police closed it (yep) to allow a parade of service men up the Champs Elysee and then for some dignitaries (we think it was the President). Parisians are not patient people and of course they had no idea what was going on and were tooting at people to move (who couldn't because the police were stopping them despite the green light). It was chaos and hilarious as a tourist to watch! Leaving the chaos behind we walked down to the Eiffel tower to meet our bike tour as we were going to ride bikes through Paris by night. It was really cool and we got to see lots of different buildings. There really is something interesting on every street corner. Whether it's the best daily made ice cream shop in Paris (Mindy and Callum, we had the white chocolate flavour - it was delicious!) or just typical Parisian style houses it is beautiful. The guide was good, but we'd have liked him to stop more often and tell us about more of the sights (although perhaps we'd have been there all night if he'd stopped at everything interesting looking!). It was a really great idea to do the night tour, because all the impressive structures look completely different when they are lit up at night -and we were able to see so so much more as we zipped past than if we'd been walking, or taking the Metro to the main attractions. The tour also takes us on a Siene river cruise which is pretty cool despite the still persisting drizzle. It was heaps of fun and a great way to see the city by night. The boats have massive spotlights on the sides and illuminate the buildings as we go past -creating amazing sights and spooky effects. Again it's a late night (as the tour finished at 11:30pm and we get home after midnight) but again totally worth it.