Travel Tips

To do Notre Dame, including the tour to the top, you should schedule two hours. From across the plaza you are faced by the impositng twin towers. Then walk up to the front facade and the detail carvings are amazing. Then as you walk around to the side there are numerous gargolye water spouts. From the back you have the famous flying buttresses and little garden. All this and I still have not been inside.

The inside could be a little lighter, but even on a cool January afternoon, the stained glass was beautiful.

I don't know who thought that decorating churches with scary things was style city, but gargolyes definitely add class. Probably low class, but class non the less. The wait to get up inside Notre Dame was over half an hour and while I enjoyed talking with some of the visitors, I had museums to go, paintings to watch dry.

But, I was pulled into again. Mona was waiting. And it had nothing to do with The DaVinci Code. It was about 4 PM and I wanted to spend some time checking out a few of the paintings.

I entered through the Richeliu entrance with my museum pass. It only took a minute to get in, then I rushed across the entry area to the Denon wing. I wanted to check out Italian, Spanish, and French paintings. Into the main wing and there was one of my favorite Carravagio's. "The Gypsy" He did a similar painting that is in Rome. As the young squire is eyeing the attractive gypsy, she is stealing his ring. I love it.

I also wanted to test my theory that the French and Spanish detested each other so much through Napoleon that they wouldn't even acquire paintings from the other countries painters. Just as the Prado in Madrid is berefit of French masters, the Louvre only has a handful of Spanish painters, and no Valezquez at all. Just a few Goya's.

There are a series of four paintings of a portrait of a man's head, made of vegetables. Each season is represented where spring is the man in his youth and winter he is old. And the vegetables mirror the season. Quite clever.