Our Man in Paris

Culture

Friday saw the Télécom Paris Club Cul' spend the evening at the Musée du Louvre. Unfortunately, I didn't know this, since they only sent the e-mail the night before. Fortunately, a group of us wanted to go anyway, and by complete coincidence, we had decided independently to take advantage of the Friday evening free entry for young people on the same night.
Whilst I had been to the Louvre before (when I visited Paris for three days five years ago), I forgot quite how vast it is. The idea of transforming a former royal palace in the centre of a wonderful city into a vast art gallery was rather reminiscent of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace. Even to one who is not an expert in the history of art, the magnificence of the architecture cannot fail to amaze in either case.
The Louvre, apparently, was considered untouchable, in architectural terms, for fairly obvious reasons, until François Mittérand had the gall to construct a prestigious new entrance, in the form of a pyramid in the Cour Napoléon. It is said that Paris has seen more "grand projets" in the late-twentieth century than most European capitals on account of the vanity of its Presidents in wishing to immortalise themselves. On this particular innovation, France was divided, but I rather like it.
For the sake of those in our party who had never been before, we headed straight to the Mona Lisa, which had been given a suitably prominent new home since I had last visited. Once again it struck me how small the painting is, compared to those which surround it. And once again, I had to wonder whether its status as the most famous painting in the world couldn't have been partly the result of some amount of hype on the part of art-lovers. Anyway, what would I know? I'm only a mere engineering student.
Due to getting there quite late, and not yet having eaten, we did not have a huge amount of time in the museum. We did a whistle-stop tour of a few Italian Renaissance paintings, brushed shoulders with some Classical statues, and then (partly for the benefit of my Belgian friend, Lieven) we "did" Flanders.
I must confess, I felt somethings of a cultural bandit. Yes, to a certain extent it almost feels like the only benefit I derived from the evening was something to put in my blog, but I would like to think that I will try to become more informed before my next visit, which I shall endeavour to make more purposeful.
We finished the evening by wondering through the streets of Paris with the Club Cul', contemplating the difficulty of finding a restaurant with 20 places at 10.30, before deciding to take our own path towards a rather pleasant restaurant called "La Petite Provence" on the rue du Pot De Fer (5eme arondissement). On enquiring what the vegetarian option was, I was told that it was basically a bit of everything on the menu that didn't contain meat. It actually proved to be a lot of everything, and was possibly the largest main course I have had here in Paris. After leaving the restaurant at about 12.30, we stayed up for several hours, watching DVDs and drinking. All in all, not a bad evening.

posted by Rorkey @ 3:07 PM