IlF wrote:waggawerewolf(from another friend but my reply suits this thread more). I went to the louvre with my sister(I don't have a huge interest in art). I saw the mona lisa(to me it was just a painting but to others no). There was a huge crowd around it and hardly anyone looking at the other paintings(many of which were much more interesting imo).
Yes, you are right. People are so obsessed with the Mona Lisa they fail to see what the other pictures are all about. And Art isn't all you see there, anyway. The Louvre is about so much more than paintings, and I'm not sorry I went, only that the visit turned out to be a bit of a disaster. You need at least 3 days there to see everything, and the Mona Lisa is just one of a crowd of statues, ancient artifacts, furnishings, and much else.
What happened on our expedition was that we went for a guided tour, but, despite all the signs around warning against pickpockets, halfway along my husband found out his wallet was missing from his hip pocket, in the room where you see Venus De Milo and the statue of Nike. Our beautiful eldest daughter got on the mobile phone straightaway and cancelled all his credit cards in Australia, and we also went to security within the Louvre. We were told to go to the Gendarmerie, which we did. And by that time we'd completely lost track of the guide and our group, anyway.
But the Louvre management did say we could come back and so the journey wasn't completely wasted after all. We did get to see a few other things we wanted to see, which included Hammurabi's codex, and also the Moab stele, a must for the Christians on this site. I could have seen a few other archaeological exhibits, that I've seen mentioned, if I'd been less upset and more prepared. We did get to see some interesting exhibits, but not much to do with the French Crown Jewels, which we wanted to see, and thought might be on display there. But these crown jewels are scattered around France, including Rheims, unlike the British situation, where we saw heaps, not only in the Tower of London, but also in Buckingham Palace, where they had a Diamond Jubilee display of some of the Queen's tiaras we see her wearing on our Aussie coinage.
We did get the wallet back, including all credit cards, over a week later. The cleaners at the Louvre found the wallet, missing only the 200 Euros I'd allotted to my husband when we arrived in Paris, for his spending money, and the Louvre management rang us just as we were about to depart to Charles de Gaulle Airport to go to Scotland. At my request, they sent the wallet, complete with the credit cards we had cancelled, his Medicare card, Driver's Licence etc, plus a nice letter in French, to our home address in Australia, where our other two daughters collected it in the mail the following week. I wasn't surprised, a year later, that the staff at the Louvre had gone on strike because of the way pickpockets made their life a misery.
Yes I agree about the beggars and hawkers around Paris. Some hawkers of giant Eiffel towers chased me at Versailles, determined to make a sale. But I certainly didn't want to buy something like that which would have taken far too much room in our suitcases. And in the cemetary at Pere LaChaise, my husband & daughter had to fend off someone who wanted to show them, around but wanted paying anyway for his volunteered "services".
There were also a lot of beggars, some of whom were really heart-wrenching, especially when they were accompanied by children, even their pet animals. Others were intrusive and frightening. None of them looked like they were starving.
We do get people like that in Sydney occasionally, but never so aggressive or frightening. I only ever saw one beggar in UK in all three times I've been there, and she was wearing a bit of cloth over her face, which wouldn't be allowed in France. When a couple of weeks later, we went around Eastern Europe we saw plenty of street theatre, which we enjoyed, but not many beggars and hawkers as in Paris, and I am wondering if this Paris situation happens elsewhere to that extent.