Paris time to get back on the bike

Today is my last day being a tourist in Paris. It has been a very mixed experience. The Paris I remember from 30 years ago has, not surprisingly, changed, and not in a good way. Paris in July is a dirty, scruffy, noisy and over-touristed town. It has also been as hot as hell, which makes life really miserable. Riding the Metro is almost an exercise in fainting from the heat. Noone can help it, everyone's sweating and uncomfortable, and there is no air circulation, so it's great to get above ground. However, the sun has been blistering, so walking on all those famous boulevards, well, it ain't all it's cracked up to be, I'm afraid!

I tried to escape the heat by spending the day at the Louvre Museum on Monday (mobbed, and the a/c is also C17th!) Yesterday was a bit better, the Musée d'Orsay, with all the French Impressionist art, and an a/c that worked.

The Louvre is amazing, both the collections and the buildings itself. I queued at 8:30am to get first dibs on a ticket 9 euros at opening time, 9:00am. A very good idea, as the queue became enormous as the day heated up, and entering a museum through a glass pyramid when it must have been in the upper 30s, well, let's just say it was toasty. Mona Lisa was mobbed, as was Venus de Milo, but after I paid my respects, I headed for the Richelieu wing, with all French art and sculpture from Middle Ages and beyond, which was great as fewer people, and the collections were wonderful. I've been visiting Gothic churches all through Normandy and Brittany, and the Louvre has similar treasures, properly provenanced, so it was wonderful to get the full picture, and also know that it's possible to see this stuff, as good or better than the Louvres' collection still in place in little French towns.

The Orsay was equally wonderful. It's a terrific renovation of a train station from the 1840s that was almost demolished in the 1970s. Now superbly renewed, it has a collection of just about every famous piece of Impressionist art you could wish for: Van Gogh and Gaugin from their time together just outside Paris, Manet, Monet, Corot, Coubert, on and on and on. "Dejeuner sur l'herbe" is big and extraordinary. And "Olympia" is just as outrageous as when it scandalized the locals back in the late C19th.

Cooler today, so walked everywhere. Leave tomorrow, early to bet the traffic and head for Versailles.

I have to quit now as the Internet shop is closing for the evening.

More later if I can.