It seems unfair that some places in the world are as beautiful as Giverny, and others are as ugly as... well... everywhere else in the world.

I went to Giverny today– you know, as in Monet’s Gardens at...? Giverny is actually a small village (too small even to be a town, from what I could tell it was composed of two dirt roads of houses) about an hour by TGV outside Paris. This means that if you were going to DRIVE there, it would probably take you like three hours, because the TGV is the French train system that goes only places within France– it stands for "Very Fast Train" in French, literally. This morning the train left from Gare St. Lazare, which was ironic to me because Monet also did a series of paintings of that train station, back in the day when it must have been a lot cooler than it is now.

So I get to Vernon at 9am, which is the nearest train station to Giverny, 7km away. I took a bus from there to Monet’s house– a fancy charter shuttle thing that just goes back and forth all day with tourists. I was one of the first to get on the bus, and as everyone else boarded, I realized I was singlehandedly bringing down the average age by at least 28 years. And I am not that young. Maybe that makes me a secret old person or something, I don’t know, but I had so much fun I don’t even care.

Because we were so early (the next train from Paris didn’t arrive till 1130), there was almost no one in the gardens, which was amazing. The gardens are divided up into Monet’s normal garden– basically his backyard– and the water garden, where all the famous Nymphéas (waterlily) paintings were done.

I wish I could explain how beautiful everything was... To give you an idea, I’ve been to the Boboli Gardens in Florence, the Tuileries Garden in Paris, the gardens of the palace of Versailles, and lots of others since coming to Europe, all of which belonged to royalty. None of them even compare to this.
There’s not even really any way to explain the concept of European "gardens." It’s not like a carrot patch the way you would think of a garden in the States. And it’s not like a park either, because there are no playgrounds, and the places you are allowed to walk are very specific, usually graveled paths running amidst the strategically planted flowers and white marble statues. (Think the setting of AFI’s "Love Like Winter" video). But this... Monet’s gardens were... unbelievable. Every space where I wasn’t walking seemed to be overflowing with plants, all of them flowering right now. And the cool part is that the only flowers there are the ones we think of as "exotic" and expensive in the US– a rainbow of tulips, irises, lilacs, hyacinths, cottage roses, anemones, wisteria, poppies, lilies, buttercups, daffodils, and more colors of daisy than I knew existed. And thanks to the wisteria and lilacs, it smelled amazing. I wandered his backyard while the morning was still chilly– I call it "backyard," but it was huge... football field size maybe?
Then to the water garden, which is now separated from the rest by a road (how tragic). Again, I have no words. Every bridge I crossed made me want to roll up my jeans and go wading around in the icy-looking water, full of brightly colored fish and, obviously, floating lily pads. The real bridge he painted so many times was the only disappointing thing about the whole day– it looked just like it should have, except that it was made out of kelly green metal. I don’t know what happened to the white wood in the paintings? Ha.

I had brought a frozen water bottle, the makings of a munster-prosciutto baguette, and a carrot for lunch, but unfortunately I seem to have frozen a bottle of SPARKLING water, which then exploded all over me when I tried to open it. I was planning on eating lunch in the gardens somewhere when I got hungry, but I finished wandering before that, and as it got later the garden began to fill with (still old) tourists. So I left the main gardens and wandered down the (dirt) road to some smaller gardens I had passed on my way in. I wandered up and down the hills in the area, finally decided to settle down somewhere, and read my book for awhile, snoozed for awhile on a bench, and then ate lunch, all in a tiny hidden clearing I found. I was probably much less sneaky than I thought– there was a bench in the clearing, so obviously SOMEONE comes there. But the wall of hedge insulated me from the tourists, who I sometimes could hear on the other side of the bushes, but who never saw or heard me. After I got bored, I decided to go wander some more– I still had almost four hours till my train left Vernon, so I needed to occupy myself.

And now is when it gets really good– if the gardens were mind-bogglingly beautiful, what I found afterward was so amazing I wouldn’t be sure it was real except for the mazillion photos I took. I wandered down the dirt road (now called "Rue de Claude Monet," or something) and passed an antique shop, a few quaint cafés set up in old rambling houses, and then the most amazing church. The church may or may not be in use anymore, I am not really sure, but the doors were unlocked and open, though no one was inside. There was a sign sitting on the ground just inside the door asking the reader to "welcome God the way He welcomes you into this house," and from somewhere toward the front soft classical music played. I was the only one inside, so I sat for a moment in the hard wooden chairs, looking at the milky glass window with sunlight streaming in onto the old-fashioned piano sitting dustily in the corner. The altar had been painted fresco-style sometime in the distant past, so there were large gaps of paint missing where the plaster showed through the deep bright colors. I signed the guest book in French, and then left.
Outside I passed a monument to a British plane that was shot down by the Germans just before the Liberation of France. The plane was shot down over one of the adjacent farms, killing all seven of the crew members. The memorial was one propellor of the plane, incorporated into a very post-modern looking statue with a Union Jack flying over it. The church itself was the parish church of Giverny, where Monet and his family are buried, situated at the foot of the rolling green hills that surround the area. I walked all the way around the tiny country-style church, then kept on down the road that had taken me that far. I passed no one else on foot, only one or two cars, and had no idea where I would end up but I figured as long as I knew the Gardens were somewhere behind me I’d be able to make it back to where I needed to get. I passed houses straight out of a fairy tale– I know I probably say that a lot, but I am fairly certain every film I’ve ever seen set between 1300 and 1600 must have been set here.

Imagine: The sky was the kind of blue called Carolina Blue if you are from the US, cloudless except for those white streaks left by airplanes going somewhere far away. Slight breeze blowing just enough to keep my hair off my neck, the smell of lilacs heavy in the air. And to my left, a crumbling stone wall that comes up just to my eye level, beyond which and in the cracks of which I can make out a hillside that slopes downward to pasture land where cows are roaming through the greenest grass I have ever seen. On my right, a lower crumbling wall, covered with soft green fuzzy lichens and trailing ivy, just high enough to sit on, behind which loom imposingly large European "french provincial" style houses– only they really ARE in the French provinces. Sagging terra cotta roofs covered with more green lichen; stucco walls in white or pale beige or pink with ivy or a pink flowery vine I had never seen climbing upward to entwine the windows framed by deeply colorful shutters. Wrought iron gates enclosing the whole thing, with the hills rising greenly behind the houses, still in use after all these years. In front of me, the dusty road winding between the stone walls on each side of it, leading to who-knows-where.
I kept walking and walking, finding myself happier and happier, forgetting the stress of not knowing where I’ll live over the summer, the confusion of my unscheduled next semester classes, the research papers and finals looming heavily ahead of me when classes resume next week. Eventually the road became a path, and then opened up widely at a main road, perhaps the one my bus had come in on. It was only then that I realized I had probably walked two miles or so. I turned around, preparing to walk back, when I realized that I could just walk back to Vernon, the train station. I don’t hike enough in Europe, and I miss it, a lot. Especially in the French countryside, when it feels like a crime to take a bus/cab/whatever. I stopped at a service station at the corner to make sure the pietonne path (a paved one for pedestrians only) I had just seen would take me to Vernon, and was assured I would get there eventually.

I took off down the path, ditching my overshirt and rolling my jeans up to my knees, walking around like I was in the Bat Cave in my wifebeater and golfer-looking pants. There was no one on this path either, and I haven’t felt as relaxed as I did as I walked down it in so long... Relaxed enough, in fact, that I climbed up the steep bank on one side of the trail, fought my way through the brambles, and peed in the woods.
Wow, I can’t believe I just confessed it like that. But the truth is that I was kind of proud of myself for being such an Eagle Scout. (Remember my realization that I don’t have enough logical, Eagle Scoutish friends when I was in Prague? Yeah, well, taking off on a 7km walk on your own when you don’t really know where you are going may not be the ultimate in logical, but peeing in the woods? That’s the pinnacle of outdoorsy Eagle Scouty goodness, in my city girl never-in-the-Girl-Scouts opinion.)

So I kept on down the path, sun shining down on me, passing only one other person, an man old enough to be my grandfather sitting on the only bench I passed on the whole path. He looked like a cross between my actual grandfather and my brother’s namesake, and when I got close enough he turned and said "Bonjour, Mademoiselle," in the most polite voice I have ever heard, reaching up as though to tip his hat to me.
Eventually houses sprouted up along "my" path, which was good because the path soon ended at a fork and I had no idea where to go. Luckily, though, I have directional instincts like a fox ("They call me Whiskas"), so I followed the way I thought was right and suddenly ended up back almost in Vernon. I made it all the way to the train station, in fact, without asking for directions. All seven kilometers of it. Which is really not that far, only like five miles, but it was hands down the most amazing five miles I’ve walked in... a really long time.

Every time I go somewhere in Europe, I think I’ve discovered where I want some other chapter of my life to take place; I’m always thinking "I want to get married here someday," or "if I get married, I want to come here for my honeymoon." And then I stop and think about it and realize I am too much of a gypsy for that to ever work, and I will spend all the rest of my life searching out new adventures and new places to see, and never visiting the same ones again.

But Giverny? Yeah, I’d like to retire there. On Rue de Claude Monet, among the bed and breakfasts and the église paroissiale.
And I’ll always have a spare bedroom for you...
~B

I was standing on the famous bridge to take this picture.

Front door of Monet's house, which is now restored as a museum that, ironically, holds none of his works.

Love this picture, perhaps more in sepia than in color. This was the south corner of the transept of the church I found. Beautiful.

"The Artist's Corner." Bed and Breakfast with an awesome terraced cafe on the bottom floor.

This one is better in color, but I couldn't find my color version of it. All the houses looked like this... the only thing that could make it more authentic would be if the roof were thatched.