The Louvre...

..is HUGE! You enter through the giant glass pyramid and go down a set of stairs to the main hall. There are three sections off of the main hall each with about 3 floors. In four hours, we went through one floor of one wing. Just the Italian and Spanish renaissance painters and the Large format French paintings.


There are so many famous pieces on display, not to mention the tons they have in storage. I got to see a bunch of famous paintings I had scene only in books before. Liberty leading the charge in the French Revolution, The Mona Lisa (the line was shorter than I thought and you can see it from the side of the line), the Club Footed Boy and a whole bunch of Napoleonic propaganda. I was fascinated by the Napoleonic propaganda. Especially the one that was commissioned after one of his victories in Eastern Europe where he lost tons of troops. To make people forget about all the French soldiers who were killed, he commissioned a portrait of him standing over a pile of dead Russian soldiers giving amnesty to the enemy survivors. The painter was given the legion of honor and an estate. I wonder if in the future, there'll be a museum with a video of George Bush flying into the aircraft carrier with the Mission Accomplished sign and the audio guide will tell how the war stretched on for years to come.

I was also amused by a work of Da Vinci's I had never seen before. I like to call it Saint John in "No, You da Man."

The hall with the crown jewels was also incredible. I take it as one of the signs of civilization's progress that all the wealth that used to be kept by the priveleged few of the past is now available for everyone to enjoy in the present.

The whole area around the Louvre has that feeling. Only royalty used to enjoy the Garden des Tuileries next to the Louvre and now they're a public park.

Neighborhood kids push sailboats around the giant fountains built for the kings of the past.

All it takes is time and access to the global market and wealth gets redistributed more fairly based on merit. I think the comment Friedman makes in his book "The World is Flat" sums it up best. "The average joe in the U.S. used to fair better than a genius in China, but now the genius in China's going to be better off." Just as it should be. I used to think globalization only gave companies the freedom to work from anywhere around the globe, but individuals are also empowered to compete. There's fiber crossing the oceans in all directions allowing anyone with a computer access to the world's information and markets. It hasn't reached everyone yet, but it will. Maybe I'm just a little too positive about globalization because I'm living it up as a Dot Com Debutante.