Our cheap guide book suggested that the best way to get into the Louvre without the great queue is to enter from the Palais Royal Metro station on the number 7 line. So we made a reasonably early start, walking down to Europe station on the number 3 line, catching the Metro to Opera where we changed to the number 7 line. On arrival at Palais Royal, we took the Louvre exit and followed the sings to a little shop selling tickets. The queue was only about 10 people long and took no time at all. We then went into the Louvre itself at the basement level and found an entrance queue of a couple of hundred people.
No sooner that we had got in the queue, we were told by a very helpful official that as we had pre-purchased tickets we could go up to the Courtyard and use that entrance - so we did and joined a queue of about 10 people. We were inside the Louvre very quickly with no standing around so we were very glad we didn't persevere yesterday. Once inside, we made a beeline for the "main event" - the Mona Lisa. It was bedlam of course. On the one hand, it quite amazing to see it and, on the other hand, something of an anti-climax. The image is so familiar, you had to remind yourself that you were looking at the original work of art. With all the crowds around, you really couldn't take your time to enjoy it either - but we have seen it!
After fighting our way out of the Mona Lisa display room, we settled down to looking at the exhibits at a leisurely pace. The Louvre is more than huge, it is immense - 12 miles of corridors we found out. All in all, we were there for over five and half hours. In that time we looked at many things and walked straight past probably 100 times the number of things we stopped and looked closely at. Quite exhausted, we found our way out and retraced our steps on the Metro back to our hotel.
Barely scratching the surface of what can be found in the Louvre
After a big rest, we went out for dinner. We walked downhill past Gare Saint-Lazare station until we came to the Cafe du Mogador in Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. We had a very nice dinner and, afterwards, walked it off by continuing down the road. We eventually came to a more touristy area and decided that we really liked the little corner of Paris we were staying. We jumped on the Metro at Richelieu Drouot on line 9 and changed to line 3 at Havre Caumartin for a train back to Villiers and our hotel.
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