Let the Perks Begin: The Louvre

The Paris Pass is awesome, the best! Free metro which we took full advatage of with upwards of 10 trips a day, museum access, discounts, etc. Today is the first day of our Paris pass so we decided to christen it by going to the Louvre. I like to be punctual but getting to the Louvre at 7am when it opens at 9am turned out to be a little much... maybe it was the freezing weather and biting winds that kept museum-goers at bay or perhaps the summer crowds have not yet made it to Paris yet but you could hear a pin drop in the courtyard, not a living soul in sight (except for the guard and his dog nice and warm inside the glass pyramid). We found a cafe across the bridge to wait out the weather. When we got back around 830am we had some company but not too terrible a line. When we finally got in it was a mad dash to the Mona Lisa which we got to enjoy for a solid 5 minutes with only a handful of people in the room. With that out of the way, we decided to backtrack and pay for an audioguide which, along with bus tours, I fell madly in love with on our trip... We wandered the museum for 3 full hours with audioguide in hand. I learned so much and took an obscene amount of pictures. Did you know the Louvre began as a fortress for the city but when the city expanded beyond the wall another wall was built for protection and the Louvre lost its defensive purpose so was converted into a Palace and eventually the museum? I didn't either. All hail the audioguide. We saw all the classics: Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, the Sphynx thing, all that good stuff. Ashley and I's favorite was Antonio Canova's statue "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss". It's a really great story and the statue was breathtaking. The audioguide was intelligent and borderline pompous in its summary of the sculpture (which was sculpted from one chunk of stone except for cupid's wings) so here's the plain english version: Cupid and Psyche were in love. They broke up. She went to work for Cupid's mom as a messenger. On one of her assignments, this guy gave her this forbidden potion (the flask of which lies on the floor behind them if you walk around to the back of the statue). Psyche is a rebel so she drank it and Cupid had to save her from death with his kiss. The statue was carved to depict the moment just before his kiss, "the gap between them symbolizing the difference between life and death". I'm no art aficionado but you could really feel the intensity of the moment!