The Louvre

Apparently my blog has been recognized as a "Blog of Note" on the Blogger homepage, which is pretty cool. Welcome, new readers! I'm going to have to ask you all to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement about Sheldon's meat pie chain idea, though.

Yesterday Nick and I went to the Louvre. It's...well, it's big. It's not as pleasant and classy a museum experience as, say, the Met (the art museum closest to my heart), but it pretty clearly dominates the Met on every other score. It's bigger, more famous, more crowded, the buildings are more historically significant, and it's full of a lot more ridiculously important artifacts. I'm not sure the Mona Lisa even belongs on their Top Five list. They have Hammurabi's Code there! Like, THE Hammurabi's Code, the actual rock on which "eye for an eye" was first written down! I got pretty nerdily excited when we saw it, especially since when I was a 6th grade history teacher I made my students do Hammurabi's Code-related crayon art. By the way, does anyone know how the Louvre got their hands on it? They don't explain in any of their english-language informational material, which makes me suspect some nefarious act of colonial pillaging. Napoleon Bonaparte, I'm looking in your direction!

Another unexpected higlight of the Louvre was watching people take pictures of the Mona Lisa. There are approximately 17 huge signs en route to the painting stating in multiple languages that photographs are NOT ALLOWED. Still, almost everyone who goes tries to get a snapshot. You can see that they know it's not allowed, because they look guilty and try to do it as sneakily as possible. The guards are apparently not empowered to take people's cameras away for breaking the rules, so they're left with no option but impotently glaring at the tourists, and, occasionally, ruining someone's picture by waving their hands in front of the camera. Nick pointed the spectacle out to me, and we spent 10 minutes standing there, watching and snickering.