Franco Fridays: The Gardens of Versailles

If pictures of tulips would lift your spirits on a Friday morning, then this is the blog post for you.  Tulips seem to be the flower of Spring around Paris.

I saw tulips in colors I'd never seen tulips before, and I'd also never seen a tulip with this fringe around the petals.

 Does he look like a prosperous landowner, surveying his estate?

Or at least a famous novelist?

Well-ordered and Beautiful

I think KJ thought it was an odd memory, but the memories of the clouds in France are really vivid to me.  They were really big and beautiful and always changing.

 

The gardens were so massive that we agreed it must take a massive amount of people, constantly pruning hedges to keep it so immaculate.  But where were they?  We saw no one and imagined an army of little gardeners coming out at night.

It's obvious that KJ and I got separated from the group here, because there are several pictures of me making faces at the camera (which I'm refraining from posting) and a few gems of KJ hiding behind shrubbery.  

Since we went into the gardens as everything was shutting down, we missed out on the magnificence of the fountains.  If there's ever a "next time" for us in France, we'd like to go back to see them.

What a great group.

Farewell, Versailles.

Back to the train.

As an aside, I was hungry at the station and decided to buy a snack out of a machine.  They had Lay's potato chips, but I got incredibly thrown off when I saw "Nature" flavored.  I was completely confused and kind of disgusted by what possible flavor "Nature" would taste like when after a discussion with a French-speaker, I felt embarrassed.  Because of course, Nature in French means something like the original or natural flavor.  I think I just got thrown off because the brand name was in English, and so I wasn't thinking about the other writing on the bag being French.  Because who would want nature-flavored potato chips?  I went with Barbecue.