The Battle of the Louvre

When you are in Paris, you have to go to the Louvre.  So I gathered my courage, because the crowds can be enormous.  So off I went.  (Vera was working on her paper for the conference, and stayed in our hotel room.)   After fighting my way through the security lines, past a shopping mall with a Starbucks and an Apple store, I arrived at the very long lines to buy tickets.  When I finally got in, I had the idea to visit the new Islamic collection installation; but I couldn't find it on the map, so I decided, when in doubt, go find the Vermeers.  But the Dutch and Flemish collections were closed on Thursdays; so somehow I ended up in Napoleon III's apartments, where the excess of glitter and gold could put the Russian Czars to shame:

Underneath a chandelier:

I ended up wandering through endless rooms of excessive numbers of French paintings.

At least I went through a room with a ceiling painted by Braque:

(I must be looking up to avoid looking at the paintings...)


Finally, I got to the Islamic collection, which is housed in a new area created in a courtyard, which looks like this from above:

Under the roof:

The collection proved to be very interesting; no pictures of important people...   I was especially intrigued by these doors, made out of a kind of mosaic of different kinds of wood.  The were done in Egypt in the 14th century:

Later edit: Today, in the paper, it was announced that the Louvre had been shut down for a day, because the people working there were being harassed by the large number of pickpockets who buy their ticket to the Louvre, go in, and do their pickpocketing, and get mad if someone interferes.  

Later, I took the metro to the Marais, and ended up in my favorite Metro station.

I saw a show at a gallery of works by a Chinese artist, who does some kind of photo montages that create a merger between traditional landscape paintings and modern Chinese cities:

Finally, we had dinner with some Romanian friends in an impossibly overdecorated turn of the century restaurant, Brasserie Julien, in the 10th ar.