From Babylon to Berlin: ANES Museum Tour of Europe: Louvre: Classical Day

My students outside of the Louvre after our second visit to this, the world's largest museum.

Today was Sunday, so while we had a lot of things planned, we wanted to start our day by remembering the Lord. We certainly did, though things did not quite go as planned. We started by stowing our luggage at the hotel even though we were checking out. We then met in the large luggage room, which was private, to talk about our day and start, as always with prayer. All of us were in our church clothes and headed out from there for an LDS sacrament meeting.

We took two metro lines and then confidently followed the directions that I had checked and double checked yesterday. It was a push, but after one of the non-infamous Huntsman-forced-death-marches (I am told I lead them at a pretty fast clip), we arrived at the address at 9:28, two minutes before church was supposed to start.

But it did not look right. It looked like an apartment building. Now I have gone to LDS meetings around the world where we do meet in rented spaces of all kinds. Still, the Parisian ward whose time fit our schedule should have been a pretty established unit.

I looked again, It was an apartment block. A French man on a balcony across the street asked whether we knew what we were doing. I knew the answer. We didn't. We were lost and there was no time to get part way across town to where the ward actually met. And of course internet and phone service chose not to be particularly helpful.

I still do not know how the wrong address got into my carefully crafted and reviewed plans. And it does not really matter. I had some pretty real personal direction in that split second. I was, to be honest, mortified. We had all so been looking forward to church, and the students have to count on my always knowing what I am doing. But in that moment the spirit whispered, "This is not about you. Find a quiet place. Find a park. You'll know what to do when you get there."

Park Church!

And so we walked a few blocks and found a part with a shady, quiet corner that was, remarkably fairly empty and private. We sang hymns. We prayed. We read the sacrament prayers and remembered what they meant to us even if we could not participate in the actual ordinance. I preached a little. Well, I preached a lot. We had three volunteered testimonies, after which we sang and prayed again.

It was a great meeting and we had a spiritual feast. You have heard of home school. This was kind of Park Church! Thank you, Lord.

A Parisian Lunch

[We went straight for the Louvre, retrieved our luggage, and caught two different trains to Berlin, so I fell behind in my blogging. We had spotty WiFi on our night train, so I only posted some representative pictures from the museum the next day.]

The Classical Collection at the Louvre

Bronze Age Aegean

Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece

Many of the following are later Roman copies of Classical and Hellenistic originals.

The Nike (Victory) of Samothrace

Sister Milo is about as popular of her much later cousin, Sister Lisa (as in Mona).

Three of our sisters recreate the pose of The Three Graces.

Roman

When your daughter's middle name is "Olivia," only partly because you were finishing your doctoral dissertation on the empress Livia when she was born, well, you need to take a picture with both of them.
Eric Huntsman © 2017 for educational purposes only.

On Our Way to Berlin

Early in the evening we caught a high speed train to Germany. The views of the French countryside were gorgeous.

In Frankfurt we changed trains in the Mannheim train station, getting on an older night train. Here we clambered into Harry Potter-style compartments, fun at first but less than comfortable by the time we arrived in Berlin at 6:00 a.m.!

The morning after . . .

ANES Museum Tour of Europe

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Louvre: Classical Day

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