Sorry all, has been a hectic couple of days. Yesterday we wet to the Invalides which is the war museum for France ad where Napoleon is buried. The war museum was lacking compared to the British one but was still informative. Napoleons tomb was much more impressive, there is a giant golden dome on the top of it from the outside and inside after you walk past the guilded doors you have a one story have a balcony that runs around the middle of the building that has 4 large alcoves with great French generals buried in tombs in there. When you walk to the edge of the balcony and peer over the edge there is a half a story high green marble plinth on which sits a half a story high pink marble coffin in which Napoleon Bonaparte lies. The buildings interior all white marble and the roof of the dome is spectacularly decorated. This built up the prettyness for today. We got into the Louvre no problems, but once we where in we had no idea what to do. Luckily we saw a sign for audio guides. These gave us directions as we choose to do a tour of the great masterpieces in the building. There were three Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace and La Joconde. You might know the first two but the third one you definitely know. La Joconde is the proper title for the Mona Lisa. All three of the areas in which they are houses where packed but the Mona Lisa room (which is actually a room for Viennese renaissance painters, Mona Lisa is out of place) was chock a block. That took us about 45 minutes so we then had lunch and did another tour of the Italian masters (among other things). The suggested time was 2 hours but took us 3 and a half as we kept stopping and seeing extra paintings. There were statues and paintings on this tour which covered the works of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello (so all the ninja turtles), Caravaggio, Bernini, Titien, Canova, David, Delacroix and many others. There was more recognizable art than you could poke a stick at apart from the three masterpieces, there were even plenty I knew of like Virgin of the Rocks, The Man with a Glove, Psyche Revived by Cupids Kiss and The Slaves. To be fair I had no idea of the names. My favourite piece was Pandæmonium (Paradise Lost) by John Martin. It is a representation of the capital of Hell in the poem Paradise Lost (Pandæmonium being the capital itself) by John Milton in the 1700's. So all in all a lovely cultural day out. Can't wait to ruin that somehow (if I haven't already).

Alex