mad rush in louvre

to see the mona lisa. we found her! she was hiding behind a sheet of bullet-proof (and probably cannon-proof) glass as thick as her own head. according to a tour guide, some italian guy stole her some years back and hid her in his closet. when they found her again, she was still in that closet. he said he did it for italian nationalism. we only had an hour and a half to view the largest museum in the world because i had asked a guy mopping the louvre's beautiful floor and he told me it closed at 11 pm. in his defense, my french is always dangerously ambiguous and has questionable grammar, so he must have thought i was referring to the mall area surrounding the museum, as if i wanted to buy some bags of gummy candy or some perfume at 10 pm. which i didn't. i wanted to see some art, dammit. and so we strolled over all leisure-like, hands in pockets, to get a sandwich for lunch, chatted pleasantly, then strolled right back over to the louvre to discover it indeed closed at 5.30 pm. it was 4 pm >< ;;;;;;

we also saw the venus de milo. before we reached her we saw a large and impressive statue of athena. i told kevin i wasn't interested in the least in statues with arms. i then was asked to take a picture of him with fists thrusted in the air before the statue, in a posture of power and/or victory, mouth wide open in mock roar.

the eiffel tower was also scaled by us today. we were accompanied by a girl who was studying in spain and who could not for the life of her stop talking about spain and slipping "helplessly" into spanish, even when speaking her native tongue of english. despite this minor defect, she was much fun to spend time with, and would regale us with stories about spain, spanish grammar, spanish food, spanish host families, and even spanish lispy accents. she scaled the tower with us. even though it was only to the deuxieme etage, it was still six hundred steps, and the view was magnifique. the top was off limits to all humans that day, although we saw mysterious elevators climb slowly up the rails towards the blue zenith. it snowed slightly. our breath trailed out before us, a ghostly vapor that wafted down the tower steps as we climbed the many stairs. it mixed with other water vapors and became a rain cloud that rained upon the coast of north africa. when the rain hit the parched ground, our voices could faintly be heard rising from the earth. spooky.