Louvre

After getting some fresh croissants and pain au chocolate from the bakery near us, our friends showed up and we headed out to the Louvre. It was my first time inside the famous museum, and it's hard to appreciate just how incredibly gigantic it is. After some confusion on where to head first, we saw the signs for the Mona Lisa and followed them until we finally came face to face to the famous painting. Since everyone says it's so much smaller than they expected, it was actually quite a lot larger than I expected. It's a "normal" sized painting, and due to the timing of our visit in the middle of December, the room was very sparsly populated so it was very easy to get up as close as possible to it. Kara was amazed how empty the room was. The perks of touring off-season!

The rest of the Louvre was interesting with the mummies (I'd never seen a real-life mummy before) and sculptures. And while you could spend days in there if you really wanted to see and study everything, honestly I thought 3 hours was enough to get the highlights. Oh, and the Museum Pass paid off in divideds as it let us enter through the "Group Tour" entrance which had no security line.

After the Louvre we got dinner at a random cafe in the 1st which was tasty, and then headed home.