August 4. 2010
We woke up too early for my liking, to get to the Louvre by 9:15am. Luckily we decided to buy tickets online, which was a very good choice, since the Louvre is closed every Tuesday, Wednesdays are a line nightmare. We met our group, went straight down to get our ear pieces to listen to the tour guide, and were on our way. Let’s just say, looking at every piece for 24 hours a day, you still wouldn’t make your way through the whole museum in three weeks. So you go to enjoy the experience, and look and admire the amazing palace, art, and blisters you acquire. After seeing quite a few famous pieces, we entered the gigantic room, which houses wall sized paintings including one with Christ, and then there’s a wall in the middle of the room, holding very carefully, a small sized portrait of the Mona Lisa. So, after departing from the group after our tour, we elbowed our way to the front. I have to say that you have to be pretty aggressive, feeling as though you are entering a metro in India housing hundreds of people. I held my ground, even when the sweaty tall man kept pushing into me, and I kindly hollered, “please stop pushing!” repeatedly! I finally make my way to the front, hold the camera up, and the screen is BLANK! No battery life left. I look back, not having an idea where Jarom is, and he’s only five heads back, and he hands me the battery, and we capture pic’s of the famous art that we personally have no idea why it’s famous, but there you have it! Voila-we made it through!
We head home for lunch and for a change of shoes for me, because I have blisters on my feet from my cute shoes I thought I’d bring, and they are killing my feet, and I change shoes. I also bring along a pair I had bought in Paris and had broken to exchange on our way out to our next tour, so when we exchanged them, I then wore my third pair of shoes for the day. We head out to our walking tour of the French Revolution, and I am clogging my way about on the swedish clogs I thought would be comfortable, but only rub and exhaust my feet as we cover probably a few miles walking around Paris. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun learning the history behind this ancient city. This is our first tour through a company called “Fat tire Tours” and end up using them Thursday and Friday also. They were awesome, English speaking, and have tours in many cities throughout Europe.
We decide to find another pair of shoes, perhaps tennis shoes that I can be comfortable in, since the back of my feet are worn away, along with both pinky toes, and even the mole skin bandages aren’t cutting it. So we walk around Lafayette mall again, searching for the right shoes. We find sandals for me and my sister, but not tennis shoes. So we head to the sports store, and find some Puma’s. Yea! We also see H&M, which I’ve not shopped in but maybe once, and they have the cutest clothes at this one, so we do a little damage there, and head for dinner. We find a cute pizzeria, sit down with aching feet having walked all day, and visit with the couple next to us from Holland. We find out all sort of great things about Amsterdam, what they do, and enjoy the evening eating our yummy pizza. It starts to pour as we head out for home, and we run through the rain to the metro. The few rain showers we had were awesome, and fun and romantic. They were perfectly timed I’d have to say! We eventually got home at 10:30, started a movie on the ipad, and after minutes we drifted to sleep, anticipating the early morning we had the next few days.
Even though there were five shoe changes, it was such an eventful, adventurous day, but little did I know, that Thursday would be the best day of all!