Corks’ Self Indulgent Drivel

So we come to the end of our Italy-Paris adventure! Au revoir Paris!  Addio Italia! 😢 (we do have a stopover for a couple of nights in Singapore on the way home, however I will put this blog to bed now that our European legs are complete, although I reserve the right to change my mind if I get a request for further drivel from the multitude following this blog, or if I just want to despite zero requests) We have had an awesome time, but are ready to return to our family and friends.  The joy of travel is being replaced by the joy of home. It was a wet day to farewell Paris, but we spent a couple of hours at Musee d’Orsay  visiting with the great impressionists - Renoir, Pissarro, Manet, Sisley and of course Monet, among others.  A lot of Van Gogh work there too, before he went stark-raving mad. It was fantastic, I’ve always loved Monet’s work, but Sisley and Pissarro really sparked our passions today as well - d’Orsay is well worth a visit. The Editor  visited ...

 A few key learnings for the day: A 25 year old introvert business student from the UK who doesn’t know anything about wine, is probably not the best tour guide to get for a day in Champagne; The new mass producers of champagne (I’m looking at you Nicolas Feuillatte and Louis Vuitton) have sucked all the romance out of a glass of bubbles; Notwithstanding the above two points (and some previous comments by this blogger) there are some awesome yanks around who make days like today just great fun and loads of laughs; I didn’t think it was possible, but the bat-shit crazy Parisian drivers are even more bat-shit crazy than the bat-shit crazy Italians; There are no roundabout rules in Paris, and, in absolute fact, cars are not insured for the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe (look it up, it seriously an exclusion in insurance policies in France); Il Timoteo is right: Onion Soup in Paris is freaking elite and should be consumed for breakfast lunch and dinner; The Eiffel Tower is amazing,...

 Impressionists have always captured our imagination. The use of colours, space and light makes the art come alive. Claude Monet’s work is of particular appeal, unsurprisingly, and we were hoping to see his place in Giverny over the weekend, however the Paris train system doesn’t run there on weekends (a fact we only learned after buying tickets for the gardens unfortunately).  Today we had the pleasure of going to Musee l’Orangerie  to view the massive works that make up his Waterlilies collection. I highly recommend a visit if you like his work, it is breathtaking.  Proof that inside each artist is a 6 year old with a new crayon set Dan reckons this has more than a passing resemblance to King Charles This is what €56 worth of nougat looks like (after we made him reluctantly halve what we’d chosen) Good grief!  Reckon they didn’t see us coming? After a wander through Invalides and then down to the Latin Quarter for lunch, the rain started so we decided it was ...