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On May 27 we woke up and had breakfast at the hotel before taking the Metro to Gare St. Lazare (St. Lazare Train Station), which was one of the many subjects of the paintings of Claude Monet. We were going to find out about the next train to Vernon, the closest train stop to the village of Giverny, which Claude Monet called home for some 40 years. We hopped on the train and made it to Vernon in about an hour's time. From there we got in line with all the other tourists and caught a bus to the village. From there, we got in line with all the tourists to wait for tickets to get into the estate... you get the idea... the place was crawling with tourists.
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 As we stood in line next to a couple from Silicon Valley, we found out that the crowd might not actually all be tourists from the US... May 27 was Fête de Maman in France... Mother's Day... so lots of good French kids may have been taking Maman to Giverny for the day. Anyhow, we walked around the gardens and walked around the house and enjoyed seeing what we had seen so often in art galleries and on various book bags, calendars, T-shirts, coffee mugs and so on...
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 The lily pad gardens, with the Japanese foot bridges, really did appear to look like real life impressionist paintings... I'm not sure whether it was an instance of life imitating art, or just whether the images I had seen so often had trained me to see these gardens as reflections of the paintings, rather than the other way around. Penny received a wonderful blessing when she was pooped on by a bird — a sign of good luck they say...
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 We enjoyed the gardens for a while, then toured the house, which included Monet's huge collection of Japanese prints, displayed in much the same way that Monet had hung the prints in the house when he lived there. We exited through Monet's studio which had been converted into a huge gift shop (of course). Then we stood in a short line for about 30 minutes to get a quick bite to eat... you know, because it would be faster than going into one of the sit-down restaurants in town... we talked to some British people on holiday who said that they would have been sacked if they offered service like this in the U.K.
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| We took the bus back into Vernon, and then the train back into Paris for the evening. We set out to locate the National Picasso Museum, and found it after a while. Unfortunately, the museum was set to close about 15 minutes after we arrived. So we looked around for a while before we were kicked out.
 Next, we set out to get Penny some art. Penny had heard about an area in Paris where one could find an open-air market of paintings and portraits and such... she had been told that it was right around the Notre Dame Cathedral, but we hadn't seen it when we looked... so we asked the concierge some more about it, and he pointed us to another church, Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart). The church is located atop a hill which overlooks all of Paris... it's quite a climb, but well worth it. I must admit that I was a bit cranky after rushing to find the Picasso museum only to spend 15 minutes there... after climbing a butt-load of stairs I was less than enthusiastic about life... I could have used a beer... and lo and behold, at the top of the stairs there was a cart full of stuff to drink... so scrounged around some francs and got myself a Heineken.
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 There were all sorts of people hanging around the church, and after walking a couple of blocks we found the artist's area... unfortunately we didn't have much cash on hand to buy a painting, so I set about trying to track down an ATM... Unfortunately, I couldn't find one. So we decided that we would try to come back to the area when we came back to Paris at the end of the trip, and we could buy her some artwork then.
 In the meantime, we decided we would get something to eat right in the same neighborhood. It was our first Sunday in Paris, and we weren't exactly sure how many restaurants and cafés would be open close to our hotel. Since this area was crawling with tourists, it also had lots of restaurants which were still open at 8 at night. As we were eating our dinner some crazy guy in a red cowboy shirt and a 10 gallon hat came up and started singing "Hotel California" in front of our table. Penny looked in her pocket, but she didn't have enough change to pay him to STOP playing the song... so he continued... when he was done I asked him if he knew any REAL cowboy songs... perhaps something from Bob Wills... he had no idea...
Since we didn't have any change, we offered him a glass of wine and some good company; he obliged us, and sat down with us. We started talking, and it turned out that Pete Sarsaparilla (for that was his stage name) turned out to be from Mount Pleasant, Michigan. So we talked with Jason for a while (for that was Pete Sarsaparilla's given name) about Paris and what brings people there and all sorts of other things... He played us one of his original songs, and then we called it a night and we parted ways... but who knows, you might hear about him again someday...
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