Monet, Anyone?

Colors!
Heheh, I took a picture in the house which was forbidden. The pictures, not the house.
If this doesn't look slightly familiar, you didn't pay attention in art class.
That woman sort of looks like my high school principle from a distance.
Polly wanna baguette?

We went to Monet's Garden at Giverny today. IT WAS BEAUTIFUL, ETC. After taking a train out of Paris* we took a bus to the village of Giverny which was adorable and we had some slightly overpriced, but still delicious food. We got to walk through his house and the gardens and saw the famous lily pond. The house was interesting because, I kid you not, ALL of the walls were covered with Japanese prints, with the exception of the bedroom and the kitchen. That one picture I took inside the house? Imagine those prints except about 20 more all on the same wall, that was the house.

The gardens were really pretty and had tons of different flowers in them, of course. I'm not really a flower person so I didn't get that many pictures of it, but I did take quite a few of the water lily pond. The pond was actually across a road so we had to walk underground to get to it from the main garden. Like most things, the pond was a bit smaller than you expect it to be, but it was still pretty healthy in size. It took us about half an hour to meander around the pathways, but then again, we were stopping to take pictures and had to weave through Swedish girls and prostitots (yes, I spelled that term correctly; Google is your friend if you need a definition, but the portmanteau should be enough to give you a good idea) the whole time. Oy vey.

Overall the place was great, though. I saw a pair of parrots, or pairrot, if you will. The weather was perfect today which was amazing. I got a book about Japanese woodblock prints that was in the Atelier turned Giftshop and managed to get Cathy, Richard, Doreen and I back to the apartment smoothly. I even spoke some French, which I'm getting better at. At least simple but important things are easy enough for me to convey and understand. On a totally unrelated note, I need to fix my posture. It's rather atrocious.

* After getting to the station, we found out that there was a workers strike for the train systems, so none of them were running quite normally, even the Metro was messed up. The ticket machine wasn't giving us what we wanted so we had to wait in line for an hour to talk to a human being to get the right tickets. If it had taken 10 minutes longer we would have missed the train. Why do the French have to protest everything?