Jaunted

In this article about the changing habits of museum-goers the author bemoans the loss of quality time at museums.

Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride....

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

Of course, we went into the Louvre knowing that we could not see it all. You'd probably need a month to do that. Yet with only four days in Paris, we didn't really want to spend more than one afternoon there. And the truth is museums tire us out fast.

Maybe it's the walking, maybe it's that we're trying too hard to absorb everything in a given wing or even just on one wall of a hallway to even keep up. Before we know, an hour has gone by and we're yawning and scoping out any place to sit closeby.

Perhaps we should take the suggestion from this article's author and sit down with a sketchpad. That way we'll be sitting and we'll at least have spent some quality time studying the art.

When you're doing "the museum thing" on your travels, how seriously do you take them? Do you try to go to as many museums as you can or do you pick one and try to do/see as much there as you can? And would you even sit down with a sketch pad? Sound off on what type of museum-goer you are in comments below.

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· Mona Lisa Condoms for Sale in Paris [Jaunted]