Day 12- Sunday 19 June

Today we have more of a picture book format:

Abandoning a few hungover souls who didn't manage to make the bus, we went out of the city as a group today to nearby Giverny, a small settlement in a valley that was utterly unremarkable aside from its having Claude Monet's house, and also it was pretty:

Rolling hills, wheat fields, looming rainclouds, oh la la. Our first stop, of course, was his house:
To which people flocked and in which I was not allowed to take photos or touch any of the interior plants [they did a good job with them, and they really complemented the [doubtless] reproductions of his art that were on the walls of his atelier [studio], and apparently Monet collected Japanese prints, and those were lining all of the walls, really interesting]. Taking my time skirting the house garden, full of roses and nameless countless blooming things and bumble bees, I went on to the water garden:
A part of which was a water lily pond, but also of the faster-moving stream from which the pond got its water, and there were bridges and trees and benches and it was great, really. By this point, I'd completely lost the rest of the group, and moved on to explore the town on my own before our rendez-vous later at the impressionist art museum. So here is a bit of the main street:
And here an art fair that, on a lawn, with hills all around and no sound of the highway, with a cool wind and impending rain, reminded me incredibly of Maine:
Walking through the town, not especially tempted by the cafes and antique stores, I decided to check out the stream, a sort of detour of the Seine that met back up with it eventually, too wide to jump across, surprisingly fast-moving, lined most along the way by private, but conveniently uninhabited property. On the other side of this property were stretches of fields and then the hills, bright red poppies spattered:

Poppies everywhere, actually, it was hard to choose a photo. I walked along it for a bit, found a plank:

And then found an ostrich!

This is me with the ostrich!

Aaand I'm bad at auto[self]photography. A gite [B&B] in the town, tres picturesque, with its own section of the stream, had a farm-ish thing to attract guests that included: miniature horses, Vietnamese pigs, a lot of geese, kangaroos, emus, llamas, and of course one ostrich. This is another bit of the town, complete with corn field, that I photographed while walking to the impressionist museum:

Oh, and I detoured again, voila:
No pictures allowed inside, but it, too, had a thriving garden, and the artist being shown, Pierre Bonnard, a contemporary of Monet's, definitely had a lot to teach about colour, and it was interesting to see his style evolve. Spreading ourselves out over the bus, most of us passed out on the way back to Paris, and struggled onto our respective metros, and I went to the grocery store for yoghurt and Nutella and now I have homework due tomorrow, but today was a good mix of outdoorsy hopping fences and contemplating Art, and I saw an ostrich!