Paris Day 5

We're off to Fontainbleau, which quickly became my favorite attraction in France aside from Napoleon's apartments in the Louvre - more on those later. The castle itself is pretty much intact because Napoleon moved into it after the revolution and kept most of the furniture. It was gorgeous with almost no crowds at all. We had a lot of the more gorgeous rooms to ourselves for certain periods (after the tour groups left them) and took a lot of great pictures. The gardens were gorgeous and had a entire swan family I photographed the heck out of.

At lunch we bought more ham and cheese (you think we would have learned by now) only to discover that it was not completely dry, but slathered in mounds and mounds of butter. Just looking at it made my arteries clog up. We ended up eating the half without butter and throwing the rest to the swans, who were very grateful for the handouts.

Back in Paris, we head to the Louvre, which is open till 10 on Wednesdays, to finish up the areas we didn't get to. We finally see the Mona Lisa and a bunch of other Da Vincis, plus more Italian painters I recognized at the time because we studied the heck out of them in college...but now I cannot remember the name of a single one. They were great, none-the-less. We also manage to get through the whole of Napoleon's apartments that were left in tact. They were AMAZING. I could not imagine anything more decorated in my wildest dreams. Velvet and gold and marble everywhere. It was amazing and I could not stop taking pictures. I wish we had been allowed into the servants quarters, but they were closed off for some reason.

Afterwards, we explored the outside of the Louvre a little bit and discovered a back entrance that no one knows about. There's almost an entire mall underground next to the Louvre. It's also got its own entrance to the Louvre that had absolutely no line because obviously no one knows about it. There were a bunch of stores we went into, including a post office, so I could send out some post cards, and a Virgin Megastore, where I bought a French Les Mis album.

Overall, the day was quite a success. Our feet hurt once more, but collapsing on the bed back in the hotel helped quite a bit. We spent the rest of the night packing for our very early day to Bruges the next morning.