Today was cool. The Seine has several tourist boats operating on it, and we decided that we should take one. We picked Batobus (“boat bus”), which doesn’t have commentary but it does let you get on & off at various landmarks. When we got to the Louvre, that seemed like the right place to be so we hopped off.
There were too many awesome things about the Louvre to count. The first one I’ll mention is that when you enter the glass pyramid and want to go down to the main lobby, but you have a stroller so you can’t really take the stairs, they have an elevator in the middle of the spiral staircase that has no walls or roof. It’s just a cylinder (with railings) that rises up from the floor, lets you get on, and then sinks back down again. Style.
The second thing is the bitchin’ Apple store. Yeah I’m a nerd.
Then we headed over to the sculptures, many of which sit in a bright, sun-lit courtyard. Anna had some fun there because they have unicorns and pegasuses (pegasi?) which she’s a big fan of these days.
After that, it was Anca’s turn to vote and we went to the apartments of Napoleon III, which were so rich & opulent they made Versailles seem bland. But the twist (literally) was that among all the historical furnishings and decorations, they inserted an exhibit of modern art that was composed of metal sculptures that depicted classical subjects except that they had been algorithmically deformed. Like, the artist took a mythological hero but then ran it through a “twist” deformer. I assume he must have used some sort of 3D printer, because the forms were very intricate and accurate. So while Anca thinking about how royalty lived in the mid-nineteenth century, I was thinking about trigonometric vector functions.
After that, paintings. Needless to say, the collection is mind-blowing. We paid the most attention to nineteenth century French work. I thought this one (by Francois-Andreé Vincent, entitled “Portrait de la baronne de Chalvet-Souville, née Marie de Broutin”) was particularly interesting because (besides the fact that it’s beautiful of course) it had a little coat of arms in the corner just like modern TV broadcasts have a network identification “bug”. And here I thought that was a new idea.