How Miss K got her Louvre back

Gentle readers, I have a confession: I have lived in Paris for two years and three months, and it's taken me that long to visit the Louvre.  And, what's worse, I spent most of that time living right next to it.  Seriously, when I first moved here I was living on rue St Honoré (see these posts: Saturday mornings, Street talk  for details on that rather lovely neighbourhood) and if not for the buildings across the street, I could have leaned out my living room window, thrown a rock at the Louvre and actually hit the damn thing.  It took me exactly one minute to walk to the Louvre from that apartment, but did I go?  Mais non!  Now, you are probably horrified and thinking that Miss K is some sort of heathen animal who doesn't appreciate art but you are wrong, my pretties, so wrong (okay, fine, I am a heathen animal, but I'm also an art-loving heathen animal, thank you very much).

What happened is this:  on my first visit to Paris, about eighty bajillion years ago (I believe dinosaurs might still have been roaming the planet at that point) I was madly in love with the city and I wanted to do everything, including the Louvre.  So I went there on a Wednesday when it opened at 9:00am and stayed there until it closed at 9:45pm, and aside from bathroom breaks and sneaking into a stairwell to eat an orange and drink a bottle of water, I never stopped (and if you've ever been to the Louvre, you'll know that three hours is about the maximum amount of time you can enjoyably spend there in one visit).  So of course, by the end of the day, I was exhausted, dehydrated, bug-eyed from art overload and my feet were so swollen it felt like I was walking on flippers.  I mean, the experience was totally amazing, but I was so traumatized by the whole thing that I couldn't bear the thought of going back.  I avoided the Louvre on several further visits to Paris, and I really avoided it once I moved here, but now the Louvre and I are friends again.  We're quite literally friends - I even have a card that says so, because last month, I bought a year-long pass for the Louvre and I've started using it and it's fabulous.  I flash my card to go through a special entrance and don't have to wait in line, but best of all, I can just stop by for an hour or two and really enjoy my visit.  The Louvre is best appreciated in little, bite-sized chunks (which is not all that helpful for tourists, but it's great for locals with passes - like meeeee!) and I really like being able to just nibble off a piece whenever I fancy it.  Yes, picture Miss K perched on the Louvre like a gargoyle, gnawing away at the walls of the building and you'll get the general idea; last week I chowed down on Etruscan sculptures, next week, I'll be digesting Italian Renaissance paintings.  Get in, enjoy great art for a couple of hours and then get the hell out.  Ahhhh, bliss...