Giverny et des autres affaires quelconques

For our first weekend day trip, we went as a group to Giverny, the lovely property that belonged to Claude Monet and his wife, surrounded by hills, and composed of a lovely house, flower gardens and the famous Japanese garden and bridges that were the subjects of some of his most reproduced paintings. It was absolutely stunning.
I took an incredibly number of pictures of the water, the bamboo, the colorful flowers and the way the light hit them, the house...all of it, and it's still really not enough to reproduce the breathtaking view that we got to absorb for a couple hours. I took my time walking through the flower gardens and the house and then took a lap around the Japanese garden with the water lilies. Then, I was considering taking a second walk around just because it was so beautiful but then decided to sit on a bench and read Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, one of the books that I bought from one of the book vendors next to the Seine River that I wrote about earlier.

It's an almost-sickeningly romantic book about a guy named Adolphe who starts out as a cynical, heartless guy who has interest in nothing and has no desire to socialize normally. However, he meets a woman named Ellénore from high society, the mistress of a count, who is equally cynical, and enjoys almost dehumanizing men who seek her love. He falls in love with her, she messes with him for a while and then falls desperately in love with him. That's where I am right now. Not a particularly enriching text but interesting and I'm really excited that I understand all of the writing easily.

Sorry for the overflow of images but it is really quite necessary that I show all you folks at home how beautiful Giverny really is. I would be tempted to go back and spend another day there just reading or writing in my journal...but alas, I don't have very much free time left in Paris! I KNOW. I thought that a month would feel so much longer but when I look at our itinerary (which has been scheduled pretty much minute-by-minute), I realize that I'll barely have any time to do all the things I wanted to do. Things still left to do: visit

Montmartre and see Sacre Coeur and the Moulin Rouge, visit and take a tour of the Catacombs, day trip to Versailles.

I also tried to go out to a discothéque or une boite (a club, in the American sense of the word) last night with a whole bunch of girls in the group but it ended up being a night of wandering around a not-so-desirable part of Paris at like 12:30 in the morning. In heels. And nice going-out clothes. One of the girls invited us all to meet up with some random French guys our age who are college students, as well, at their apartment. Yeah, okay. You can imagine how excited they were when like 20 attractive American girls show up throughout the evening at their doorstep because it turned out that the girl who invited us (from our program) failed to inform us that we were not exactly expected guests. GREAT. GRAND. I headed back with like 4 other people and we had some nice conversation at Bob Cool, a really cute intimate bar around the corner from where we're staying. I went there the night before and it was very nice.

I don't think I'm made for this "OUAI! Vivre à Paris c'est la fête!!! OUAIII!!! ON VA AU BOITE!!! ON BOIT!!!!" kind of going out. I'll stick to my novels from old French men with canes and white hair and conversations with waiters and intelligent professors, merci.