Paris II - Louvre, with kids.

We saw many, many, many things in Paris.
What I loved the most was, again, probably the Louvre.

Aren´t the reflections of the glass pyramid awesome? I mean, talk about a well done mix of traditional and contemporary architecture!

Okay, everyone loves the Louvre, for the obviuos reasons, like it´s a beautiful, gigantic building, dripping with history and telling it´s stories loud, for everyone to hear, and to top it, it´s filled with the most beautiful artefacts mankind has created. So, yes, the Louvre is pretty cool. Of course, the queues are long. We´re still in Paris.
You could buy tickets via internet, but that just wouldn´t make sense, since it´s not the actual ticket sale you have to queu up for, but the security at the entrance.
Which isn´t that bad, either, since they have a nice pool to cool your feet in during the wait:

But apart from that, I was very impressed with the prices.
I mean, we´re talking about Paris. Where you can easily pay 50 Euros for a normal meal.
A day ticket to the Louvre costs 10 Euros for me... and for children under 18, it´s completely free!
And this little thing?

It´s a multimedia guide, for children, available in pretty much every language, and it costs... two Euros! Do we have a deal?
If you plan to go to Paris, here´s a link to learn more.  You can even watch some sample videos.
You can choose between two guided tours, one about ancient egypt, and one about the life at the court in the times of Louis XIII. I would have liked to take the secon option, because, after all, we were in France, but my girls decided otherwise. They like ancient egypt, apparently.
I remember, three years ago, when we actually were in egypt, and I wanted to visit the pyramides, they thought the pool at the hotel was a lot more interesting. So they promised me, next time we go to egypt, they´ll try and find a museum about renaissance France for me :)
So. We got to see the temple, and, because of that little guide, got to understand why it was built that way, and got to read what was carved into the stone.

We learned about the burial rituals, and saw bread that was 4000 years old, and a harp, that was 3500 years old, and egyptian furniture,

and learned that they believed that sickness enters the body through the left ear. We learned about their gods and their arts and met this guy:

He´s my colleague. Okay, he was reading stories to the Pharao, and I´m reading stories to the wild children of Leverkusen, but still, I felt like I could relate to his job. Painting pictures with words, that was his job, and that´s mine. Oh, and he did also write them down, his stories. I think we could have been friends.

Maybe this is something that I love the most about history. Yes, people 4000 years ago were very, very strange. They prayed to multiple gods and weren´t educated (like we are...) and had weird rituals (like we haven´t).
And then again... can you see what the woman in this picture is holding?

We were told that she isn´t holding things, but letters. Hyroglyphes. She´s bringing food to the men working on the fields. And the little thing in ther right hand, that looks like a cupcake, that´s the hyroglyphe for... cake.
Which made me wonder if she had a cupcake tray, like I have.
I guess she hadn´t. But still.
4000 years aren´t a lot, when you think about it.
I wonder what their music sounded like, back then.

It´s raining, here in Germany.

Isn´t this beautiful?
I admit it took me a while to treasure the french language. I learned it in school at an age when I was fully and completely falling for the English language, so it didn´t stand a chance. When I went to France, it always was a lot easier to use English instead of French. I needed to learn another language, Polish, before I realized the attitude and communication changes when you are able to talk to people in their native tongue. And maybe this helped, too. So I am, slowly, learning.
This artist, I first heard on the radio, months ago, at around six in the morning, when I was barely awake. I remember I told my sleepy brain to bookmark her name, I mean, come on, Zaz, that´s three letters, that´s not too hard?
And then I forgot, until this week, so... Merci beaucoup :)