Dear Dad,

Today we went to the Louvre, it was AMAZING!!! But I missed having you there, because I had no one who wanted to read all the signs with me. I saw a ton of cool stuff but no one wanted to go quite slow enough. However, I did take some cool pictures and I read all about each exhibit, so here's what I saw:

We started in the ancient statue exhibit, there were statues of all the greco-roman gods and statues of many of the emperors. I took pictures with Aphrodite, Diocletian, and Marc Antony. After going through the statues (they also had some really cool sarcophoguses, sarcophogi? However you say it... they had cool caskets that were covered in beautiful high relief carvings). We went upstairs and started in the early renaissance art and then went through French artists of the 18th century. It was amazing. I saw so many paintings I'd only ever read about. However, I did not get a picture of the Mona Lisa. I walked by it, looked at it from a distance and promptly took a picture of the masses of people trying to get a picture of the Mona Lisa. I was satisfied. There were beautiful paintings by David and Delacroix in the French section. In the Italian section they had a little write up about how the artist Titan was the first painter to use really perfect the technique of piling lots and lots of layers onto a single canvas to build up a color. I thought that was cool. Then we visited early Byzantine art with lots of beautiful religious paintings. It was great.
In between the European art and the next gallery there was a beautiful room that was completely decked out. The walls were covered in gold relief and tons and tons of paintings. Most of the paintings were of architects (potentially those who contributed to the building of the Louvre maybe?) but there were also two French kings pictured in there. Louis XIV and Henry IV had their portraits up on the wall. Henry was cool, but Louis seemed like an ironic choice since he was the monarch who ditched the Louvre for Versailles, but who am I to judge?
After going through much or European art we ended up back in the Roman section and we visited a room that had tons of really really old blown glass. Did you know that the Romans were the ones who developed the method that we use today for blowing glass. Cool! The method used today for glass blowing is almost exactly the same one that the Romans would have used. They would shape some dishes themselves and other ones were blown into a mold and then allowed to cool. There were also a lot of later roman pots that were soooooo cool to look at. Poor Amber and Danielle didn't know quite what they were in for when they took me to a museum.
Finally we ended today's expedition in the Egypt section, which was sooooooo cool. They had mummies and sarcophagi and statues and I was grinning from ear to ear. Amber has a whole lot of pictures of me looking like a kid at Christmas or reading through all sorts of cool information.
Tomorrow we have a big masterclass and I will be playing in my trio for Narcis Bonet, who is a really cool famous old French musician. He speaks little to no English, but he speaks Spanish, so we can communicate. I keep running into him on the subway coming home from classes and I'm in another class that he teaches. All those years of Spanish are being put to some good use here.
I'll upload some pictures later. My internet is being really really slow.
Love ya,
Nicole