versailles

last sunday i went to versailles, the grand palace that louis xiv built outside of paris so he could avoid the french people and the diseases that spread so quickly in the city and so that he could have all the nobility under one roof in order to better control them and assert his own absolute power.  as an art history major i had seen lots of photos of versailles and been amazed by the grandeur and sheer size of the place so i had a lot of expectations about what it would be like.  

i'm sorry to say that i was a bit disappointed. i wanted to be overwhelmed but i wasn't. it wasn't so much the palace itself that was disappointing but the presentation. yes there are a lot of tourists but there are a lot of tourists at the louvre too and it is still astounding. what i found annoying was that, unlike at the louvre or another museum, you couldn't simply wander around at will. there was a very fixed course that you had to follow which i thought made it hard to get a sense of the scope of the building. 

the royal chapel, above, and the ceiling, below. beautiful. i wish we could have gone inside though.

i didn't take very many pictures because photography wasn't allowed in most areas. probably because they want you to buy the guide book (i did).

the gardens. we didn't get to walk through because it was raining :(

another thing that bothered me was the murakami exhibit.  for the past few years there have been exhibits of contemporary art in the main rooms of versailles including the hall of mirrors. i know one of the past exhibits was jeff koons.  i believe the reason is to try to lure parisians to versailles but mostly it just seems to be making everyone unhappy.  i really wanted to like the exhibit because i like the idea of the mixture between old and new, east and west, but in practice i found it really distracting and frankly a little tacky. what do you think? 

despite everything, i still would like to go back to see the gardens and also to see marie antoinette's estate which we didn't have time for.