Touring the Louvre, like seeing Rome's Colosseum or New York City's Statue of Liberty, feels like one of those things you simply must do when visiting Paris. For some travelers, seeing its most popular painting — Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa — is a bucket-list item.
I'm not necessarily one of those travelers, but I am susceptible to FOMO, and because millions of people visit the Louvre each year, I figured surely they must be onto something. So on a recent trip to Paris, I joined hundreds, if not thousands, of other tourists on a pilgrimage to see the Louvre.
I had prepared myself for it to be busy, and went in without much of an expectation to see anything without a flock of other curious people looking at it, too. All in all, it was about as packed as I expected, with shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic clogging up most of the spaces.
From the entrance to the Mona Lisa, here's what it was like.