Louvre

Our final morning in Paris was mostly spent inside the Louvre. Even though I’ve been before, I was totally okay with going back. I loved being able to walk through and point out pieces I learned about during one of my several semesters of art history during college. So we hit up an Eric Kayser bakery for our last croissant (and my coffee) in Paris on our way to the museum.

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Knowing we had limited time left in the city that morning, we bought our tickets in advance for the 9AM time and spent about 2.5 hours at the museum. It instructed us to enter through the main pyramid entrance, otherwise I would have taken us to the less busy side entrance near the Seine River. When you buy a time specific ticket, you have to enter within a certain time period or you may end up getting booted and put in the general admission line. Being it was 9AM on a Sunday, lines hadn’t really started forming. It was really nice to see the courtyard with next to no one there. The day before it was packed. We actually saw people having wedding photos taken that morning!

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We headed straight for the Mona Lisa knowing that the crowds would flock there, and we were correct. The painting itself is probably 16×20 inches at most. It’s small! (That’s because every time it’s been stolen, it’s been cut out of its frame, making the painting smaller each time.) We then worked backwards from there in the museum, both strolling through galleries and searching for specific pieces. Tim was determined to find the Code of Hammurabi before we left.

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After the Louvre, we headed back to our attic AirBnB to climb those stairs one last time. The next stop on our trip was the one I was most excited about – Switzerland.

–m.