Free Museum Sunday

Even the plants eat well here in France -- only meat for them!

Actually, I saw this shop on the way to "The Academy of Beer" where I went for lunch. In LA, over the summer I took up beer making as a hobby (have made and bottled 2 batches). Joining a club, the Maltose Falcons, has educated me about different beer flavors and the ways in which smaller brewers can make things that taste better/more distinctive than the large mass brewers! So, one of my food goals while here is to taste some interesting beers. There's a brewpub 2 blocks from our apartment, but Maxine & I weren't impressed. So, I'm in search of other places to get good beer. The "Academy" isn't a brewer, but they have about 20 French, 50 Belgian, and assorted other beers. They're a 15 minute walk from the apartment so I went there today for lunch ---- avoiding the meat eating plants along the way!






This is one of the "41 most important pieces in the Louvre" -- more on that in the text lower in this entry.

This is the table at the restaurant we went to for Maxine's 50th birthday.














This is Venus de Milo's rear end. I actually took the picture because I was more interested in the number of people taking pictures of a sculpture!

The first Sunday of each month the national museums in France have free admittance so I took advantage of it and spent Sunday at the Louvre. I was there for around 5 hours. The museum is more enormous than you could imagine, but they make it easy for you by printing a map of the entire place with tiny pictures of each of the 41 of their most important museum holdings. In what is purely a move at being compulsive, I'm planning on viewing each of the 41 items before we leave at the end of October. I'm half way there and my feet know it! It is a bit silly though to wander rapidly through this enormous museum looking only for 41 specific things -- sort of like a scavenger hunt through centuries of art! But, it's all I can do!

P.S. That picture above wasn't the restaurant Maxine & I went to, it was from "Napoleon's Apartment" -- each of the 3 Louvre pictures in this blog entry are among the '41'.