l'anniversaire à Paris..... le Louvre and so on...

On Monday we spent the whole day in the Louvre museum, o my gosh that place is sooo massive!!!!! its unbelievable how much stuff they have there.

we decided that a good idea would be to get the audio guide cos all the labels of all the things were in french so if we wanted to know what we were looking at we'd need something in English!!! the audio guide was one of those fancy multimedia ones which was cool it had a couple of guided tours on it. we started with the 'masterpieces tour' which took us around the most famous pieces of the museum and told us all about them. we saw the Venus de milo and the mona lisa again and also the Victory of Samothrace and others and it told us about the architecture of the building too cos it was originally a royal palace.

we looked through the large scale paintings (by large they mean really large like whole wall sized!!!) and after that we looked around the antiquities collection and saw tonnes of Egyptian things and Greek and roman stuff. and around some of the Napoleonic apartments (more gold everywhere) there was so much and we were exhausted by late afternoon so we headed home! the museum was amazing but its just so big, we thought the British museum was big but we actually made a dent in that we could go back to the louvre tonnes of times and still not see everything.

The next day was our last in Paris... :( sadly. We took a boat cruise down the Seine River and looked at all the sights from a different angle. The bridges are so beautiful we got off at the Eiffel tower and had our lunch in the shade of the gardens beneath it. and took more photos of it!!! (by the way not long now till we get out laptop and can put up some of these photos i keep going on about!!!!)

We cruised back to Notre Dame and walked up to the Pantheon which is a huge big domed church that throughout history has been used for both religious and civil purposes and is not actually a church anymore. Lots of famous historical people are buried here including Victor Hugo (author of the Hunchback of Notre Dame). we were lucky enough to be just in time to join a tour up to the towers and the outside of the dome so we climbed some more stairs and had another view of this beautiful city.

and that was all there was time for, we went back for our luggage (its so great not having to carry round everything you own on your back!!) and caught the euro star back to London. (which caught fire two days later and closed the tunnel for a few days, lucky timing us!!!)

Overall it was an amazing trip, Paris is a city filled with beauty and for us it was such a romantic way to spend our anniversary. The most memorable bits for me were - The Eiffel Tower, the food and climbing so many steps to get views of the city from everywhere we went. :)


So now we're back in Warwick and working hard again, but still enjoying ourselves. We went out for a few drinks on Monday night. I have discovered 'cider black' apparently what all the students drink, which is cider with blackcurrant cordial in it, mmm tastes mostly like sugar!!!

Much love to all
Gem and Jez