Louvre & Notre Dame

Today is my longest standing day. I went to louvre museum and Notre Dame with my dad, and I basically stood from 9 to 6.

louvre museum was pretty big. And till I wrote this journal, I am still not sure if it is louvre museum or lourve museum. The pronunciation and spelling look similar enough for me as an English learner who knows no more French than the French know about Chinese (they just keep saying 谢谢 to us, which is thank you). My dad responded at first and was surprised, but now he didn’t really care that much as well.

It is sometimes interesting to reflect back on the Mass service and the Western culture from my dad’s eyes—someone who doesn’t really know anything about religion, history, and language. He approached everything from his aesthetics, from his photographic instincts. For example, I love when he pointed to the Renaissance arts about Greek goddesses and told me (who was taking photos): "This drawing is just okay. The lady is a little overweight. I like the slimmer ones."

And louvre is so big and there are so many people. We waited in line for like an hour at 9:30. And we were trapped there for 6 hours, but we only went through 2.5 floors. And because it was raining today, I didn’t get to see Shakespeare and Company as well.

But we went to Notre Dame. We got there at around 4:40, but because I wanted to see Mass at 6, I told my dad to take whatever number of photos he would like. I know for certain that was enough to keep us till 6. And I was right. I didn’t take out my phone to take tons of photos, except for the Mass recording and some photos at the entrance. I just felt like there was enough photo taking and phones and talking. So I really respected the people in the service at Notre Dame. I personally would not like my service to be a public display and have thousands of tourists around me talking and taking photos. And I felt especially bad for them because some of the audience are a little bit disturbing, or simply confused about Mass in general. Some of them (not all for sure) seemed pretty curious about every locked door and every blocked access, and thus they were determined to record everything with their phones.

I am going to Versailles tomorrow and I don’t want to repeat what you can learn in a museum here in my journal, nor do I want to talk about stuff that everyone knows. So I think I will just conclude here and see if more thoughts pop up to me tomorrow.

I have given up on uploading pictures…. There are too many of them and it’s not too easy to upload them to this blog. I think I will have a google photo album link later maybe and possibly I will cut a vlog. So just enjoy the pure text version.