When I am not wandering the streets of Paris or having
my personal space invaded on the metro, I am going on excursions with the
Trinity Program and getting to learn more about France. We had two trips in September
and two more in October. It’s been awhile since I have written and my excuse is
that there are too many cafes and parks to keep me busy and not enough time to
sit and blog about everything. In early September, we visited Giverny to see
Claude Monet’s house and gardens. Before the trip, we had a really good lecture
on Monet, his life and the impressionist movement. This was enough background
information so I could appreciate what I was seeing even if I wasn't a
specialist. I absolutely loved the gardens that we saw. The one with the pond
and the water lilies that inspired so many of his paintings was great and made
me think of the Green Lake in Kunming, China that also had water lilies. In
front of his house was another garden, this one with flowers of every kind and
color. It almost made me want to go into gardening!
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| Monet's Garden w/ the Water Lilies |
Before getting to Monet’s
place, we made a stop at le château de la Roche Guyon. It was my first chateau
visit but won’t be the last one during my stay here. Even though it took
probably 100 some steps using narrow stairs to get to the top, I loved how everyone
in the group hiked up there because the view was absolutely gorgeous. This is
something you can judge for yourself in the pictures below. On this same trip,
we made a stop at France Miniature. There we made a trip around France, seeing
everything that the country has to offer before we got distracted by rides that
operated themselves.
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| A view from top of the chateau |
The other trip we took in September was to the Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte. I have yet to visit Versailles but I hear that Louis XIV had the guy who built
this for himself arrested and then use the model for his chateau. What was most
impressive about this chateau was the garden. From the inside, it didn't look
like anything worth mentioning. Once we got outside, we truly saw how massive
it was. At one point, it looked like we could just walk straight to get to the
statue at the very end, but then as we got closer and we saw that there was a
river in front. I really enjoyed these two trips and the fact that I was
surrounded by so much history. I am not saying that I don’t see history on a
daily basis in the US or France but I know that too often it’s easy to read
about things that happened back in the day and not think too much about them.
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| Vaux le Vicomte |
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| France miniature |
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