Paris

Over Christmas break I visited Paris in order to study 5 different sarcophagi each containing Dionysian themes in one way or another. I am not one to complain when I travel to other countries and find I cannot understand the language, in fact I am a very strong believer in trying to speak as much of the mother language as I can while in a certain country, and by doing this I have become quite talented with hand signals. However, when I have traveled to a specific sight for a specific reason to find that one of the largest, most respectable art museums in the world refuses to put the description of the art they hold in any language but French I am a bit thrown off…especially when the pieces were not found in France, but were obtained in some other way…but that is another story. I was not too put off by this, with Italian I was able to understand what I needed and reminded mysef that I was mostly there to observe the sarcophagi and come up with my own conclusions. One thing I noticed right away was that this trip was going to be a bit different from my trip to Pisa. At Campo Santo it was November and I was one of the only visitors in the museum, and the only one taking pictures. I was now at the Louvre, in Paris, during Christmas break, the story was a bit different. As I got my camera out to start taking pictures of selected sarcophagi it did not take me long to notice an annoying trend among my fellow tourists…that being, the minute I started to take pictures about 10 different tourists would look at me, take there camera out, and start to take pictures as well. For one, they couldn’t have known anything about the sarcophagi because as stated before the explanation was only in French, and for the most part these people were from Japan, for another, of all the things to see as a tourist in the Louvre I wondered why they chose my very selected topic, of if I must put it bluntly…ancient coffins to take dozens of pictures of. In the end, they eventually found there way to the Mona Lisa, but it still took me the same amount of time to take notes on 5 sarcophagi in the Louvre, as it took me to research 20 in Pisa. In conclusion, if you plan to undertake this same task in the future, go to a well-known museum during the workday, or early in the morning, or perhaps, when the rest of the world is not on holiday.