Day 43-Musee du everything

We had a very long but really amazing day at the Musee du (everything) Louvre today, seeing such works as (of course) the Mona Lisa, sculpture by Cavona, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, masterpieces by French, Italian, Dutch, and other masters. We only spent 5 hours there, and had a bit of a speed tour, but saw every specific piece that we wanted and quite a few in between, which definately took some fore-thought.
Yesterday Asli separated from Hannah and I for the day to go shopping on Champs-Elysees, which sounded like great fun to her and a waste of a day to me. Hannah and I preferred to see other things, and were joined by a new Australian friend named Alex. She was really cool and the three of us saw quite a bit, though we were off to a slow start after we arrived at the Centre Pompidou to find it closed. We parted ways with her around 6, used the internet/phone, then were off to the Eiffel Tower. Since we're poor, especially me by this stage in the trip (do you think 300 EUR will last me for the next 2 weeks?), we decided to find our own way to make it special. We stopped by a super market and picked up some cheap wine and brie, then by a Patisserie for some "pain" (thats bread, if you didn't know), and headed off. I don't know if taking a bottle of wine to the top of the 300 m tower is allowed, but I assumed not, so I slickly removed it from my bookbag before the brief inspection, and slipped it back in before we boarded the elevator up. The view from the top was fabulous, and though we were a little chilly, we sat on the base of a coin-operated viewfinder and indulged ourselves in our mini evening picnic. The strobe lights sparkled on our way up at 9, and again on our way down at 11. In between, we just sat and talked, took in the view of the expansive city and the Seine, and watched people envious of our wine idea stroll by.
Our next stop is possibly Lacoste, France, which is in the south and is the location of one of my alma mater's campuses. We'll see how that goes since it has no train station and the closest one is about 25-30km away.

By the way,
Amsterdam was a blast and really seemed familiar to me for some reason. A lot of brick, bicycles, not too many tall structures and the autumn leaves reminded me of a combination of Savannah and Pennsylvania.
We did all of the expensive museums there of course, including Van Gogh, Rijk, Anne Frank, and saw some other sights like the very interesting Red Light District ( a story for another time).