A FULL DAY OF PARIS: Early in the morning to late at night

Unless I say otherwise, assume we woke early... this time off to the Musee D'orsay, an old train station turned museum. We skipped the long line (our first of two today) and went right in with the Paris Pass, snagged an audioguide, skipped the backpack check-in (not trying to lose anything at the hands of careless museum workers..) and got to work surrounded on all sides by great artists like Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezan, and many more. We got a few views of the Sacre Couer from the top floors, watched a parade of soldiers on horseback go by in the street below, and watched a lady paint a copy of a painting hanging in the museum right there in front of our eyes!

After the museum was braved the cold rainy drizzle and gypsies to put one of our extra locks on the bridge and shredded the combination! (Bridges all over Europe especially but other places today as well are covered in padlocks, sometimes intialed, dated, and even engraved. According to one of our hostel roomates in Paris, the tradition started in Venice when padlocks were first invented. Couples would lock their padlock onto the bridge and throw the key into the body of water below to symbolize their eternal love- so Ashley and I aren't a couple in the traditional sense but we will love each other forever :).. that counts in my book!) We went home to change into dry clothes and headed to the Eiffel Tower for our ascent to the top! We skipped a huge line of at least 150 people and walked casually straight to the front of the line and were on the lift within 10 minutes. The beauty of pre-ordering tickets. We got to the tippy top, took some pictures, and headed back down. We walked around a bit, stumbled upon a cute little market and pedestrian area on Rue Cler, then back to the Eiffel Tower that night at 10pm sharp to see it lit up and sparkling. AMAZING!

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!