Art-attack!

So much art, so little time.  Two days ago after what has now become a 2 or 3 hour morning routine of waking up, putting on music, eating baguettes, drinking coffee, doing yoga, sketching or journaling, and sitting around talking in our gorgeous flat, I went with the boys to Notre Dame.  Words cannot describe the pure architectural decadence that is that church!  Every inch of the outside of the building has a statue or carving or gorgeous stained glass covering it.  I saw it several times from the outside on our walks around the latin quarter (the trendy artsy student area of Paris), but this was my first time going inside the church.  First off, let's just say that any description I can come up with for the beauty of this church is going to probably be the equivalent of a black and white photocopy of it at best.  As soon as you enter the door you're completely surrounded by archways upon archways, all at least 3 stories high and beautifully carved.  There quiet French choir music playing all around you and huge groupings of flickering candles about every 20 feet or so.  Oh yeah, and there's about a million tourists taking photos, but what can you do?  There are hundreds of statues and paintings and enormous stained glass windows, the most famous of which is the giant and beautiful rose window that you can see from the bridge over the seine.  By the way the seine is also beautiful, especially at night, but it is sadly hideously polluted.  We walked around the building in awe for at least an hour.   Afterwards we decided that we had enough time and a hankering for more art, so we took the metro to the Montramarte district (the district in the north of the city with the Moulin Rouge and all the belle epoche stuff) and went to the Salvador Dali exhibition.  It was kind of tricky finding the right street, but I immensely enjoyed the walk (despite the rain) because it took us up cute little cobblestone roads and through courtyards to the top of a large hill where we got a rockin' view of the city.  The actual exhibition was amazing and contained sketches, prints, sculptures, videos, quotes, and really cool holographic images (they're doing a special limited time holographic Dali show right now).  It was amazing and we spent quite a lot of time wandering around the exhibition.  Afterwards we came back to our flat for our average night of drinking wine, cooking, listening to music, watching films, talking about art, and sketching or journaling.

Then yesterday, after an exceptionally long morning of our usual goodness, Matt and Markus went and explored the Jewish quarter, and Guy and I went to the Louvre.  The Louvre is free for cats under 26 on Friday nights, so we were keen to take advantage of that.  The Louvre is another marvel that I've walked around many times but was going in for the first time. The Louvre is somewhere I've always wanted to go and finally got to see.  It certainly did not disappoint!  The artwork was amazing, and the museum itself is a work of art.  I saw the classics, the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Sphinx, etc.  I was most blown away by the dripping decadence of the Naopolean III apartments.  I was rendered speechless by their beauty.  The Louvre is perfectly laid out so that every area reflects in it's structure and design the art that it contains.  After spending hours stumbling around the Louvre I felt literally drunk off art.  I had trouble walking and talking and thinking because I was in a complete sensory overload.  Everyone stop what you're doing right now and come to Paris! You must go to the Louvre! You must!  That night because it was Halloween we got all decked-out and tried to find a good club.  Unfortunately there are pretty much no clubs in our area and the one that we found was at capacity by the time we got there.  It sucks that we couldn't go clubbing on Halloween, but it was a good adventure either way.  Now I'm off to find a flea market then explore Montramarte!