Show me the Monet!

Welcome to the second post in my “September ad-French-ure” series. To recap, here’s the plan (slightly tweaked from before – now with more posts!):

Part 1 – September ad-French-ure

Part 2 – Show me the Monet! (Giverny) (You are here!)

Part 3 – The abbey on the rock (Mont Saint-Michel)

Part 4 – Villains at Villandry! (Villandry)

Part 5 – The lady of the lake (Chenonceau)

Part 6 – Blois, Blois, Blois… (Blois)

Part 7 – Da Vinci would’ve thought of a better post title (Amboise)

Part 8 – Viva la revolution! Hic! (Fontainebleau and Reims)

Part 9 – And we thought our election was bad (Wetteren and Leuven)

Part 10 – Moon Festival (Hong Kong)

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A Joby Gorillapod. Ours is red.

The pictures are coming, but I just want to kick off these next few posts by mentioning that I’m not a photo person. I hate lugging a camera around, and taking pictures is a chore that I’d rather not do even though I know it’s important to have photos to remind me about things later, long after my memory fades. Jenny’s a lot better than me in that she likes to take photos, but they’re usually the kind where we’re standing together and one of us is holding the camera at arm’s length, and you wind up with a bunch of photos that look like this (from a previous trip to Japan):

"Am I in the shot?" "Of course!"

Now I don’t mean to make this sound like a sales pitch, but in a way these posts were made possible by the Joby Gorillapod. I managed to pick up one of these on the cheap just before our trip (you can get knockoff versions from Dealextreme or Paddy’s Markets, but I found that the joints are looser on the fakes). It also helped with one of my other major failings – shaky hands.

So with that out of the way, let’s go travelling!

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Giverny

Water Lily Pond, by Claude Monet

As I mentioned at the end of the previous post, we arrived in Paris early in the morning, and left straight from the airport to our first destination. Giverny is the location for the house of Claude Monet, the father of French impressionist painting. I’m not much of an art buff but Jenny is, and having recently lined up for 3 hours in Canberra to see a few of his paintings might give some clue as to why this was an important stop on our itinerary.

We started with a light lunch (which also included our first drink – a light apple cider, strangely served in a cheap-looking plastic bag filled with ice (which you can see in the bottom-left of the first picture). Suitably fed, rested (hey, flying takes a lot out of you!), and with the thought that we were in France gradually sinking in, we were finally ready to start sightseeing!

If we look a bit ragged, it's because we practically just stepped off the plane

The attraction of Monet’s house is not the house itself (although you do get to go in and check it out, it’s not particularly exciting), but the garden. Strangely, the property is neatly bisected by a main road, and to get from one part to the other you have to go through an underpass.

Both side though, were spectacular. Although the garden was quite unruly and slightly overgrown, there were still an amazing number and variety of flowers, which is why the bulk of our photos feature them:

This is where Monet lived

Monet's driveway

Flowers from Monet's garden

A big, fat bee

Flowers from Monet's garden

… and so on and so forth. We have a LOT of pictures of flowers (and still more to come in subsequent stops). Here are some pictures from the other side, which displays more signs of the Japanese influence in Monet’s work: