Blah-La-La: January 2012

(Well, the most fun thing we did.)

It was the Louvre tour we did. Two hours in a museum with an eight-year-old. Sounds like torture, right? WRONG!

Because the Paris Muse Clues: A Family Tour for Young Treasure Hunters offered by Paris Muse was total genius. It was the most expensive thing we did in Paris and it was worth every penny.

We met our guide, Elisa, outside the museum at the Carrousel du Louvre (the thing that looks like a smaller Arc de Triomphe at the edge of the Tuileries), and we got a quick introduction to the building.

Then we went inside -- bypassing all the lines - YAY! We learned about the pyramid, and then we started in chronological order...with the actual stele that holds the code of Hammurabi. You know, when you hear about the first codified laws, ever? That exact piece of stone on which all those laws are engraved!

But the real genius of this tour was that the guide, Elisa, was describing everything in child-friendly terms, and the entire thing was structured as a treasure hunt for Boylee. So he was labeled an Art Detective, and he was given a book of clues that needed to be deciphered/found. (And which he was allowed to keep.)

And at the same time, she was also keeping me and Scott thoroughly entertained, interested and educated as well. So we were all having fun & learning!

So for that stele of Hammurabi, we learned that the dude on the right is a god, and we can tell that because he's got some horns, and some rays eminating from his shoulders...and that thing he's handing to the dude on the left, Hammurabi? That's a scepter, and that means, in a time before people could read, that people would see that the god was directly giving power to Hammurabi.

So we went in chronological order, from Mesopotamia, to Babylon...where we saw a king handing his power, via a sceptre, to his son. And why do these Babylonian things look Egyptian? Because they were trading partners and knew about each other.

We went to ancient Greece....and also had a close up look, in the lowest basement of the museum, of the last part of the original building that was the fortress before the louvre was the louvre, built about 800 years ago, including a look at the moat, and the spot where the toilet emptied! (A highlight for Boylee, to be sure.)

We eventually worked our way up to Renaissance Italy. We met the three most important ladies in the museum -- Venus de Milo (which the guide structured as a comparison between that Venus and the statue right next to it, which was a different Venus -- why is the Venus de Milo such an incredibly celebrated piece and the other Venus just a regular piece of art? There are a lot of reasons why the de Milo is more beautiful, more accomplished and more special, but a big part of it turns out to be publicity -- at a point in time when the French had to return a lot of looted art to Italy, post-Napoleon, they acquired the Venus de Milo then spent a lot of time parading it around all of France as the newest, best, most important treasure, way more important than the crap they had to return to the stupid italians).

The second important lady: the Winged Victory (which, did you know, is at the top of those stairs because those stairs were specifically built for that statue, to highlight the audience's experience of it).

And last of all the Mona Lisa (which we approached not as most tourists do, from the middle, but from the right side first, looking at it and discovering that all sorts of things in the painting appear "wrong," then from the left, where all those "errors" suddenly look correct. And by the way, Elisa knew exactly how to get us past the huge crowd. Genius!

And by then Boylee had filled in all his clues, which led to a code that had to be deciphered, and when it finally was, it led him to the Bagagerie (the bag check), where he had to recite a phrase he'd learned: "Je voudrais recouperez mes affaires, s'il vous plait." And the charmed ladies of the bagagerie handed him a bag which held his prize: a book/game about the treasures of Paris, a very sweet keepsake.

So -- I don't know if I've managed to describe just how delightful and informative this event was. It's definitely the best 2.5 hours (it went a little longer than the 2 hours we booked) I've ever spent in a museum, and Boylee was thoroughly engaged and educated. It even made the madness of the Mona Lisa worthwhile, which is saying something.

Highly recommended for any families with kids -- and it makes me believe that their adult tours are probably wonderful as well.

And then, to round off our afternoon, the sun was going down as we exited the museum...