24th December - Christmas Eve!

Today was the second day of our two-day museum pass, so we met Lisa early to go to as many museums possible!  We were a museum viewing three-headed monster!

First we went to the Louvre, obviously, and headed straight for the Mona Lisa.  Lisa and I lost Charles on the way there and discovered that we'd overshot the entrance to the Mona Lisa room by about 50 metres!  Poor Charles thought we'd left him forever!  Anyhow the Mona Lisa was pretty okay, much smaller than I thought, and kind of annoying to view because of all the billions of people there.  BILLIONS.

Other things we looked at at the Louvre: Venus, Ramses, a MUMMY, various Egyption relics, Ancient Greek stuff, lots of paintings of Jesus.  Charles and I would like to go back again!  It was really good and we hardly saw anything, even though we were there for over two hours.

THEN we went to another museum called Musee des Arts Decoratifs (or something).  It was all about hand made stuff and design, I think.  We mostly looked at a bunch of fashion by famous designers (Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christan Dior), which was cool.  Then we went into a gigantic maze of rooms with art deco stuff, art nouveu stuff, old chairs, renaissance stuff.  We felt tired and wanted to leave, but to get out you had to go through another gallery of "animal" stuff, which included crocodile skin boots, a giant metal rhinocerous, and also chairs made in the shape of dogs.  At the end I didn't really know what the museum was trying to achieve.  We also noted that there were about 5 floors we didn't even look at.

Following that, we walked in the freezing cold snowy weather to Musee d'Orangerie, which is famous for housing some of Monet's Waterlilies.  The museum was basically two large oval rooms with four huge curved paintings covering almost the entire wall space.  Look it up!  Awesome.  And beautiful too.

We were tired after three museums, so took a train to a place where Lisa said was a good Japanese restaurant.  We all had ramen, and it was pretty good DESPITE the staff all being Chinese (lisa overheard their conversation - she's a handy person to have around).

We went to a famous department store called Galleries LaFayette which was in full-on crazy mode because everyone was buying last minute presents.  We saw lots of fashion by famous designers (Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Dior), which all had dresses for thousands of euros!  A BIT out of my price range, you guys!

After we got all crazied out, we all went home.  The end!  Happy Christmas!