Chapter One.Six: To the Louvre

The metro ride to the place de l'Opera (plaa-s the lope-ay-raa) was ridden by multiple hub points being closed (for maintenance) due to which we spent close to an hour getting to a place which we could walked over from the Eiffel Tower in a lesser time. What gives eh?

Having eventually taken a circuitous route to the place de l'Opera, we met up with the acquaintances and exchanges the necessary pleasantries before we set out on out first marathon walk. Destination one: Musée du Louvre (myoo-say dyoo loo-vre). It was close to 4PM when we decided to walk the walk. Kindly note the time; its relevance will be enlightened later.

Getting to the Louvre from place de l'Opera is just a matter of walking down the mammoth avenue de l'Opera. The avenue is lined by structures depicting some awesome baroque architectural influences and offers plenty of opportunities to capture them into frames like the fountain with the angelic fountainhead depicted here.

Walking on cobblestonened paths can be an extremely painful experience especially if you are wearing footwear with soles that boast of widths next to nothing. And I was one of the exponents of the said experience which made the situations about to follow that much more difficult to swallow.

A cursory glance over the leaf of the map we were carrying spoke about the visitor timings
for the Louvre. Taking special interest in the same (since we were aware that Louvre grants free access to tourists for a certain number of hours on certain weekdays), we realized that the museum closes entry at 5:15 PM. That when we were approaching the rue de Rivoli (roo the Ree-vo-lee), the intersection at which the Louvre is located.

We staggered into the Louvre grounds through the impressive arched gates and were confronted with the enormously grafted, thoroughly architected Louvre palace which now serves as the home to the museum. The palace is grand in the real sense of the word and is shaped as a rectangle with one of its sides knocked off in its plan view. The ugly beauty spot in the scheme of things therein is the glass pyramid that serves as the entrance to the museum.

The structure has come in for a lot of flak from purists who argue that a modern artifact has no place among things so serene and artistic. All said, it does add a contradictory notion of beauty the way rightly placed moles seem to make some faces that much more desirable!

With entry denied to the Dan Brown-made-populous monument, we continued our walk after some necessary levels of photo-capturing.