Day 10- Saturday 5 June

No transportation strike = went to Versailles = [seriously] 9 hours of standing/walking = can't be bothered to eat.

So Versailles isn't a skyscraper, but it's still huge, and the parts they don't let you into are probably, what, x4 what you do see? I've got the map and could look, but it's five feet away, too far. Got there fairly early, felt totally in my element surrounded by tourists, white tennis shoes, flip flops, crocs and all, and it turns out it's all pretty much by audioguide now. There are tours you can attach yourself to, and I saw at least 3 German ones, 2 Asian [something] ones, a Spanish one, but no English [and French too, doi, I listened in on those a bit][because I'm slower than the tour-herds]. So, too big to describe, took about 300 photos, but the interesting bit was thinking about it- no wonder the gardens are so big, they must have been freaking bored all of the time. A basic apartment was a study/library, bedchamber, washroom and general hanging-out salle, and it's all well and good if you're a prince or a general or prince-general and have something to do, but what about the princesses? They were just meat until they could be married off, and it's difficult to tell from paintings but I don't think the inbreeding really helped them. And I've never seen so much marble in my life, never really thought about it, but the audio-voice talked about different quarries it'd been imported from, so that's a whole entire world I know nothing about, where good marble comes from.

I'm rambling, sorry, again, tired, and still planning on doing the Louvre and maybe d'Orsay tomorrow. Aie. Didn't explore all of the gardens because I wanted to do a good round of Petit Trianon and M. Antoinette's hameau, hamlet, which she had built so she could pretend to be a peasant. I really liked that place, it was like a Disneyworld for adults, with a mini-farm, cutesy buildings with flowers blooming in terracotta pots and roses climbing the walls that you explored with different intimate gravel paths, little kitchen gardens you stumbled upon everywhere, a lake with fish in the middle of it all, you get the idea. Then there was a mini-wheat field, and mules, and another pond full of goldfish with a fake sort of bluff with a room on top overlooking the kingdom, you know, it was awesome. Back to the formal gardens, though; when I got my ticket to go in, the lady told me it included the fountain concert, and I had no idea what she was talking about but just smiled and moved on. I wander, hear music, go towards it and it's a recording hidden in the hedge, a preview to the concert, mebbe? Not sure. In a different mini-garden, same thing, different hedge. In the King's Garden, same thing, no big deal, only this time I notice that there's a fountain at the other end going haywire, and THAT is a fountain concert. Got some on film so that I can show everyone- they orchestrate [it's not a fountain with a centerpiece but] a series of water jets to correspond to music, and I hadn't seen that before.

Actually stayed so long in the Trianon area that they locked me in and I had to jump a wall, which was funny, and walked back along the main pool, and it's another great place where the Real French chill; there were families with kids, groups of people, older couples on benches, and the neat bit was when some school or independent team got to the lake and started crew practice. I'm not sure where the boats came from, but there were about a dozen put into the water within the half hour I sat down, zooming about, coaches screaming in French, with the sun getting lower in a sort of haze. It gets fully dark around 10.20-ish. And that was just one chateau, oh geeze.