Paris Day Seven

It's hard to know what to write about our visit to the Louvre today, so I'll just spill out some random thoughts and opinions I have.

The entire place is a hideous tourist trap. Everywhere you turn, walk and look there are flash-toting swarms of idiots who meander aimlessly around looking at everything through the LCD screen on their digital cameras. The excessive amount of people made it extremely difficult for us to enjoy the experience, and I ended up just watching in morbid fascination as swathes of tourists posed in front of every painting, took pictures of every painting, and proclaimed just how amazing every painting was.

I must be missing something.

I quickly bored of the Louvre seeing as I'm neither a fine art, museum, or twatty tourists in their thousands fan. Before I leave the subject, I will offer a little advice to anyone thinking of going: buy your tickets from the Virgin Megastore near the front entrance to the museum. It takes two minutes and saves you around an hour of queuing (and the fact that Larissa and I seemed to be the only ones who saw this lovely ticket loophole was a bit of a bonus).

Anyway...

Later, we popped over to Pére Lachaise (a huge graveyard with some very interested burial plots) and then afterwards tried out my idea of getting the metro to a random area for dinner. We ended up in Belleville which was a bit rough. In ten short minutes we witnessed a bar brawl, some shouty youths and a road full of irate beeping drivers. Still, it was interesting to see that Paris has its 'Leith' just like every other city.

Back on to the metro then, and off at Esplanade Des Invalides where our guide book recommended a little bistro called 'Au Petit Tonneau'. Monkfish and duck were the order of the day served in a charming little place with Madame Boyer at the helm and a waitress that didn't take too kindly to Larissa. Larissa's food was a bit cold and the vegetables were not very appetising so we did the very British thing of swapping food onto each others plates to spread the lack of consumption around without being rude. When the waitress asked if she enjoyed her meal, Larissa did the other very British thing of lying through her teeth and saying it was delicious. The waitress took one look at the vegetables left on her plate and the unwanted fish that had been transferred to mine and shot her the most hilariously evil dirty look which actually scared my poor wife into a childishly guilty silence.

There's a first time for everything it seems!