Mom's visit and the Louvre

Mom's here! Which is one reason I didn't update this one time, but I have others. For one thing, we were in Paris. We spent a good three and something hours yesterday at the Louvre seeing art and art and art and artifacts until we really couldn't process any of it anymore. I swear, they have more paintings of Jesus as a muscular white guy at the Louvre than I've ever seen.

Anyway. We saw the Winged Victory (which is big!) and the Mona Lisa (which is little!) and innumerable tablets of heiroglyphics and ancient languages I've never heard of, and the capital of a column from some temple, which was so huge that we could barely imagine moving it with a crane. We saw the Venus De Milo and mocked her shapely backside. We saw about a hundred thousand representations of Mary, Jesus, and various saints. There were huge pieces of art and tiny tiny pieces of art and crown jewels from various rulers and what looked like playhouses from the ancient Middle East and toothpicks and sculptures of pharoahs and rulers and gods and goddesses and every so often we'd just stop and look out the window, because the Palace of the Louvre is beautiful all in itself, with lots of detailing on the windowframes and on the ceilings. It's huge. In three and a half hours, we barely saw half of it, I would say, and even then we were skimming, not spending too much time on anything. They have a couple of pieces in alabaster from the cathedral that used to be Cambrai, which was nice to see. Heard of a lot of American English, too. That was funny.

So now in Paris we've seen the Louvre, the Gare du Nord, and the Metro (i.e. almost nothing). Wednesday or this weekend we plan to go back to see Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur and of course the Tour Eiffel. Mom's jetlagged and it's the time of the semester that I'm tired, so we're not trying to pack everything in quite at once, and since I'm still at work this week, most of the traveling and sightseeing will be next week.

Cata's brother is here. They speak very quickly in Spanish, though he speaks good English. Today we took him ice skating while Mom wandered around the little stalls of the Christmas market drinking hot cider, and then we bought hot chestnuts and gaufres (a kind of sugary waffle) and considered the chocolate covered pears. I argued the railway clerks into giving me 45E back, which was an accomplishment and made me feel good about my French, and then we came home and made quiche (and stuffing, because we had two stale baguettes).

And now it's bedtime, because I've got to get up early and go to school tomorrow. Fortunately, living in Cambrai is worth the half hour commute.