We did not have much plan today, I allocated today for a visit to the Louvre. This time is INTO the Louvre.
We entered the Louvre from the back entrance where the inverted pyramid is located as we took the metro directly to the station Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre
This is how the Louvre is suppose to be like in a summer's day - filled, packed with people hehe...Long queue as always, and for a world class museum, 10 euro is not expensive at all... And the best thing of all, I've been to the Louvre for three times, n everytime I got in for FREE! I love the benefits of being a student in Europe :)
We did not have time to go through every single thing in the museum, and we did not go to every section of the museum, we simply did not have tht much time as we had a flight to catch at 6 in the evening. We visited the Mesopotamian section, Egyptian section, Roman & Greek sculptures and artifacts, French & Italian paintings.
A bronze sculpture below showing a centaur grabbing a woman, then the next sculpture a man fighting a centaur. We assumed that the centaur grabbed the man's wife, then the man beat the ass out of that centaur lol...
And thanks to best selling book of Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, and the making of this book into film, the inverted pyramid and Mona Lisa had become a must see in the Louvre. So we paid a visit to Mona Lisa as well.
We then continued to see some paintings.. 'Liberty Leading the People' and 'Joan of Arc' paintings.
Before we left, we visited the African section... Creepy looking artifacts... And we took a photo with dumb dumb from Easter Island as well :)
We saw 2 interesting paintings when we were on our way out... 2 paintings painted from the front n back view of the fighting scene...
We headed back to the hostel, took our luggage, then took a metro to Gare du Nord to change to RER B, to CDG Airport. At Gare du Nord, we had a little problem here... The counter had a long queue and the ticket machine only accepts coins and cards, not notes. As I was looking around to find a way to buy the tickets, i asked Sin May to wait for me at one spot. There was no way that i could buy with banknotes, wtf, they accept Visa Debit so, if there is extra charge, let them charge la... Luckily my card had been changed to Visa Debit... If I was still using Solo card tht time, I would have been dead... After i bought the tickets, Sin May told me that when she was waiting for me, a man approached her speaking French, did not know whether he's a begger or mentally ill or what, he juz bugged her for a while then left, still tht left her a bit stunned... The train was packed, n there were a lot of French-Africans... It was hot n stuffy, and a baby cried all the way.... zzz...
It was a long way to walk to the gate.... zzz.... I thought we had not much time d so i did not want to eat d only pass through security.... but then, flight delayed.... Gate changed.. then last minute flight arrived in time... What a mess.. The waiting area was hot, no aircond...
We flew past the beautiful Alps on our way to Venice, but unfortunately we could not take any photos because none of us sat next to the window... We arrived in Marco Polo Airport after around an hour. The airport was located at the coast and we can see the sea juz right next to the runway when the plane was landing... Interesting..
We did not book our accommodation on the island itself. Instead, we booked our hostel in the mainland of Venice, a town called Mestre. We chose that hostel because it was right opposite the train station, and we needed to take a train to Rome at 4am on the day after tomorrow.
When we reached the train station we took sometime to find the hostel because the hostel was located in a building without clear signs, then took sometime again to try to pass through few gates and getting to the correct floor. Luckily, someone came down then only we were able to go up. The instructions to get to the hostel was really unclear. However, everything turned out good after we checked in. The hostel was ran by a chinese family, and they insisted that we should eat and settle down first before doing the check in procedure. Home-cooked chinese food, rice, fish, meat vege, soup etc. It was better than expected, and i felt welcomed here. We got a big room, meant for 3 ppl, since only 2 of us stayin, we had a spacious room, with our own plasma tv :) since it was quite late already, and there was nothing to see around the area, we juz stayed in the room during that evening. I chatted with the son of the owner (the receptionist) n some other chinese tourists, while watchin football with them for a while. They were really nice ppl, even the mineral water n beer in the kitchen can be consumed anytime free of charge... They even prepared a very comprehensive guide about Venice for tourists like us n i must admit i was very impressed. Me and Sin May watched a few movies dubbed in Italian then gone to sleep.Below is the view of the train station outside of our window, n me reading the guide provided by the hostel.
(to be continued..)
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