Saturday, 22 December 2012

Chateau de Versailles

Oh! How behing I've fallen. These pictures were taken way back in October, but I'm just now getting around to sorting and posting.

Here, just press play on this while you are browsing this post:

While I've been out to Versailles before, it's one of those places that you can just keep going back to.

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I have yet to tire of it anyway. It's overwhelming on so many levels. The crowds, the scale, the decor, the gardens, the lesser chateaus within the estate. Oh, and the prices. Holy Moses, they do charge you a king's ransom to enter. Lucky me, I'm local enough to make use of the fact that it's free the first Sunday of every month. Go!

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Also...check out this site, where you can take a virtual tour of the Chateau.

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The palace is usually so packed with people- tour groups pushing their way past and blocking all the good sites, bottlenecks that take eons to push through...it's enough to make for a tough day. The gardens, however...

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The gardens are just fantastic to get lost in. Ah, André Le Nôtre, what a fantastic artist you were.

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They only run the fountains on special occasions...summer nights with fireworks and such...but when we were there, they had some ballin classical music blasting from speakers all over the gardens. Made the situation somehow more regal.

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This was, by far, my favorite micro-garden. It's Jupiter, breaking through the earth.

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I stopped counting at 20, but let's just say that there is a very large colony of stray cats living in one section of the garden.

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If one thing Paris has made me appreciate more than anyplace else, it's how beautiful things look in late afternoon light when the sun is actually free of the burden of clouds.

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