I took a surprise trip to Paris with my girlfriend for her birthday. She had never been to Paris before so I was prepared for visiting the usual main tourist attractions including the Louvre and the Mona Lisa.

I’d been to Paris a few times before but not for a while. On previous visits I’d skipped a tour of the Louvre Museum itself satisfied with admiring the outside of the building. I had been missing out.

The Louvre Museum is one of the most popular museums in the world and it’s easy to see why. Not only does it display some of the finest artworks in the world but the building itself is extremely impressive. The Lourve was orginally a palace and spans a huge space meaning that you could spend all day wandering admiring the exhibits.

The outside of the former palace is as impressive as the inside with a large glass pyramid used as the main entrance to the museum. The pyramid was originally built by I.M. Pei in 1989 to let more sunlight into the underground floor of the museum. It was controversial at the time but has mostly been accepted as a good solution and interesting mix of modern with the contemporary.

The museum contains European sculpture and paintings as well as Roman, Greek, Egyptian and Oriental works of art. For those with even a slightest interest in art a visit to the Louvre Museum is a must.

The big attractions come in the form of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the ancient Greek Venus de Milo. On busy days crowds tend to flock around these works of art. It’s a shame that it’s difficult to get a closer view of the Mona Lisa to truly admire the skill of Da Vinci’s brush strokes but the quality of the Museum greatly makes up for this minor disappointment.

The Louvre is in the heart of Paris and should be on most tourists lists of things to do in the French capital. Be warned though, the museum is immense, impressive and worth dedicating some time to.