Giverny is a quite small town with narrow cobblestone streets, old tudor houses with vines crawling up the walls and quaint B&Bs. We came to visit Claude Monet's old home, where he painted all of his water lily paintings. His whole garden was so lush and wild, far from the blocky, geometrical French gardens we saw so far in all of the places. Monet's home had a lot of Japanese influences (Japanese artwork hung up on the walls, bamboo plants all over his garden...), apparently despite not having ever been to Japan. So it was kind of a whole different world from the bold gold (hey!) interiors of what famous French buildings are usually expected to look like.
Pierce Brosnan (refer to previous post) showed us around and brought us to a cafe called Les Nympheas (after Monet's paintings) and we had the BEST tarte tatin in the world. To this day, my mother has still been craving for another slice.
We drove around the countryside to see Claude Monet's other houses, his grave, his wife's grave (bit morbid, really) and these pebble things - WHY DO THEY EXIST - kept getting lodged in my loafers and it was so annoying. At one point, we were looking for the grave of one of Monet's relatives, but Pierce Brosnan said he'd never been here before, and so we, with our tour guide, got lost together in small the French village. We then chanced upon two little blonde French boys around nine or ten years old on their bikes riding down the slopes, and Pierce Brosnan proceeded to ask them where we could find the graveyard. They pointed us in the direction and then continued to ride down the slope with no hands on their bike and laughing with each other. Weird holiday, huh? Asking little children where graveyards are?
(It was behind the church).
We drove on hills where people built their homes into the stone of the cliffs, like living in a modern-day glorified cave.
The French countryside in summer is extraordinarily colourful! Especially from the poppies! Gosh everything was so pretty!
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