Monet's Water Lilies

After promising myself since last fall that I’d go to Giverny, Monet’s home and gardens where he painted his water lilies, I finally made it this weekend as a reward for having finished my Master’s thesis. Since Valentin had never actually seen the water lilies paintings, we swung by the Musée de l’Orangerie and took advantage of our free admission since we’re under 26 years old to just check out the two best rooms of the museum. From here we caught a train to Vernon and then a taxi to Giverny.

We wandered through gardens with a surprising number of old people and parents with their children. Okay, I guess you should expect that at a garden in the closest thing French people have to suburbia, a small village forty-five minutes outside of Paris. To their credit, we did spot some thirty-somethings in motorcycle gear in the gardens, and it didn’t look like they were there for obligatory community service. The gardens were beautiful though to be fair, after the Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in Washington, D.C., Monet’s water lily garden doesn't really have such impressive water lilies.

Highlights of the day:

1. Teaching Valentin how to pop impatiens seedpods, leading to our looking more than a bit overly enthusiastic about the flowers as fellow tourists passed by.

2. The crazy chickens. If Monet every spent some time painting them, I have not seen the end product. Then again, as the poor man spent his later years nearly blind (about as cruel a fate as Beethoven's going deaf), these guys could have moved in without his even noticing.