A Stranger in a Strange Land - Sunday

It's our last day in Paris. We decided we just had to tour the Louvre museum and we were going to spend all day there if we could. The place is huge and we have heard that it can take 2-3 days to see everything.

We got up, stopped at McDonalds for our first actual French McDonalds breakfast. (Please believe we normally don't eat McDonalds every day) and we ran into a bit of trouble. The evening menu is pretty straight forward with Sandwich, Fries, Coke etc. But the breakfast menu was mostly in french and the menu changed every 3 seconds and was very hard to read. I wanted to get some eggs, pancakes and coffee but ended up with 3 small croissants, 2 coffees, a cocacola light, a bacon pancake (weird), some other dry overcooked pancake, and a bacon egg and cheese mcmuffin. It also took about 25 minutes to get our food and there was only one person in front of us in line. Soooo that was an interesting start to an interesting day.

We headed down to the eiffel tower where our bus tour "Les Cars Rouges" starts, to get on the bus that we knew would eventually at some point take us to the Louvre.

But they were having a half marathon right around the Eiffel Tower that day! Thousands of people running and being cheered on by marching bands and jaunty scottish tunes played by bagpipers. It was at this point that we realized we may never see the beautifully cobblestoned streets of Paris again so we took a picture.

We needed an alternative route as our bus stop was in the middle of the race and it looked like the tower was pretty much off-limits to any bus traffic for awhile. Jessi picked up the map and like other french explorers such as Jacques Cartier, Joliet, and the Cavelier de la Salle we headed off into uncharted territory looking for geographic treasures.

On the other side of the tower is the Champs de Mars where we picked up the scent of Les Cars Rouges and eventually found a bus to take us to the Louvre. We boarded the bus and eagerly waited for it to stop in front of the famous museum.

3 stops later we realized it had skipped the museum! We asked the driver who told us that he had to take a different route because of the marathon. We decided to stop at Notre Dame and do some quick shopping for souveniors, grab a crepe or two, and enjoy the scenery for a bit before figuring out how we were going to get the the Louvre.

I believe this is where we captured this fun picture.

Map in hand we caught the bus once again and started off towards the Louvre, only to realize that once again we were headed in the wrong direction! We asked the new driver, and he told us that because we had stopped to eat, the marathon had ended and they were back to the original route which had already run by the museum and wouldn't be back for 2 hours.

Argh! Luckily the driver was extremely nice and dropped us off across the river from the Louvre and we only had a short walk to our destination.

Did I mention we walked by a building that was covered in grass, ivy, moss, plants, and trees?

Crazy huh! Back to the museum. This is the site of the famous book and movie starring Tom Hanks - The Davinci Code. Having read that I had an idea in my mind what it would look like but I was allll wrong.

The place is immense. It has a huge courtyard inside which i show an aeriel view of in Thursdays blog. It is chocked full of some of the world's rarest and most famous paintings, sculptures, and artifacts. The entire place is a maze of stairs and elevators, eateries and places to shop. One of the neat things about the Louvre is that it is free for those who are 18 and under. Which was crazy since I just had my 17th birthday last week and Jessi wasn't going to be 16 for another month. Hehe of course we paid the nominal 9 euros a piece admission and headed in.

Our first stop which was a half mile and 27 flights of stairs away, was to see the Mona Lisa. We were informed that it unfortunately it was not for sale. Ryan thought she had a big nose anyways.

They had some paintings from a few small mostly unknown painters.

And some awesome egyptian artifacts and greek sculptures. At this point the day was turning into evening and the museum was going to close soon. Ryan who hadn't had a nap all day was losing his patience with all humanity and was threatening to go on strike. We left the museum and headed to the closest bus stop where we saw something I have never seen or heard of in my entire life.

Police on rollerblades. Priceless

Ryan decided that he wasn't going to wait an hour for the busride so we found a taxi and hi-tailed it back to the hotel to enjoy a nice dinner of jambon wraps, salade, cocacola light, and butter cake. After packing up and trying our best to keep Ryan entertained we set our alarms for 3:15am and fell asleep dreaming of the 3 hour train ride home in the morning.