Brian Ross II

There is simply too much here and it is all much too close together. On top of that, most of these paintings are dense and rich. Do you want to overload your ability to take in visual stimuli? Do you want to become exhausted at the idea of looking at things? This place will do that to you. If you cram a room full of two dozen masterworks and then cram a building full of hundreds of such rooms, you rob each painting, each accomplishment of its worth and you render all these great paintings little and loserly.

I am a real appreciator of art so it pained me that I was left unable to even appreciate most of the paintings. It became this sad march to just get through them all. I lost, somewhere along the way, my ability to let things catch my eye, my ability to be impressed by amazing, detailed works of perfect technical proficiency.

Unless you have the time to really let things sink in, (and I don’t think you’ll be able to do this unless you’re a citizen of Paris,) then you’ll just have your mind fried and no edifying experience to take home with you.

Do you enjoy being concerned about where things end up on your computer? Do you enjoy not letting yourself put things on your desktop? All organizing your computer will do is make you care about these things and an organized computer is a very difficult thing to maintain. In the end, you’ll only become less happy with the organization of your files.

It’s kind of a waste of time.

Maybe it’s just who I went with but I found the whole experience to be a painful drudgery during which I put up with my friend’s desire to get black-out drunk in every country we went to. It was a three week whirlwind of looking at cool stuff, meeting well-traveled folks, sharing stories then coping with existential loneliness as you get drunk with people you barely know and an old friend you now want to murder, feeling close to nothing on a continent thousands of miles from anyone you care about.

During the experience, I went broke and I feel like I could’ve done this better. I learned a lot though so if you don’t want your experience to be like mine, you should make sure you and the people you’re going with have the same interests, plan your trip heavily, skip on Eurail passes (which are far too expensive) and keep a journal of everything you do.

The journal’s the part I least regret. It’s details how not-worth-it the trip was with excruciating detail.