The most beautiful seasons of the most beautiful sites -Part 3-

8 Goa in low season (INDIA) 
They say the best time to visit Goa is when the weather is coolest between November and March. But many Goans prefer the monsoon season between June and September. The rain was welcomed by parties and celebrations, and the campaign turned green almost overnight. The advantage of a trip to this time of year is that you will not have to endure the crowds and the prices are lower. In October, at the beginning of the tourist season, the beaches are still pleasantly empty.

The vaccine against typhoid and treatment against malaria are strongly recommended during the monsoon.


9 Dublin at Christmas (Ireland)
December is busy in Dublin. During the "Christmas Dip at the Forty Foot," organized swimming at 11am on Christmas Day in Sandycove (village immortalized by James Joyce in Ulysses), the bravest are the return swim to the rocks at 20 m from the shore. During the Christmas lunch, a toast listening Fairytale of New York, The Pogues. Get back festive meals and forget your post-Christmas blues by attending popular Leopardstown Races (December 26-30). Finally, go to Funderland, Dublin traditional carnival which takes place from December 26 to January 9.

Intoxicated by Guinness, you may dare tempt Christmas Dip at Ringsend Pier (2 to 3 km from the city center), where the howling wind intimidate the most seasoned.



10 New York in June (United States) 
The first month of summer, New York's only parades, street festivals and outdoor concerts. SummerStage offers a dizzying programming in Central Park, all the more remarkable when it is usually more than 20 ° C. During Restaurant Week, enjoy attractive discounts at upscale restaurants. As for the month of Gay Pride, culminates on the last Sunday of June with a grand parade in Fifth Avenue involving drag queens, gay police, gay leather and other community representatives rainbow sky.



                                                                                               Source : lonelyplanet.fr

The most beautiful seasons of the most beautiful sites -Part 2-

5. netherlands During the tulip season 
Spring is the season of love but also of the tulips. For centuries the Dutch have revered this fine plant. To see the different varieties and discover the impressive array of colors that deploys the tulip, visit Keukenhof, the largest flower garden in the world. This 32-hectare park hosts seven million bulbs from 600 varieties of tulips, enthroned among other flowers such as daffodils or lilies. The visit of these fields can be done on foot, by bike or by boat.


6 Tokyo during hanami (Japan) 
The Japanese are the angels during the short season of hanami (blossoms): plum blossom early in February, and then it was the turn of the peach in March, and cherry trees in late March and early April. In Tokyo, two locations are dedicated to the worship of the flower bud: the Ueno and Yoyogi parks, old barracks turned into public gardens. Yoyogi, the most famous, is a hive at this time of the year. Shinjuku-Gyoen, one of the largest green spaces in the city (58 ha), offers a more serene atmosphere.

Meguro River is also a good place to enjoy this show: it is lined with more than 800 trees that can be seen from Nakameguro Station (they are illuminated at night).




7 London in May (England)
With the first rays of sun, Londoners swap their drab outfits against sequined dresses and eccentric T-shirts. When it starts to get really hot, rather than to seek shade and freshness as you would to the south, many people sunning themselves to improve their complexion. Every square inch of grass of the smallest public garden was stormed at lunchtime. Later in the day, how about a beer in front of the windows with flower boxes pubs. Tunes jubilant music wafting through the open windows and it even happens that you smile in the subway.

Capture the thrill préestival during a walk in Hampstead Heath.

The most beautiful seasons of the most beautiful sites -Part 1-

A city, a region can completely change the face of one season to the next. Choose a good time! 

1 Barcelona during Carnival (Spain) 
The Carnestoltes (carnival, in Catalan) in Barcelona in February or March. It includes several days of parades and festivities, which end 47 days before Easter Sunday, on a Tuesday. Gran Rua - great parade of floats and teams gathered to welcome King Carnival - starts on or near the Plaça d'Espanya to track westward Carrer de la Creu Coberta. The following Wednesday takes place Enterrament de la Sardina (Burial of the Sardine), often on the hill of Montjuïc. This ceremony marks the beginning of Lent. A rougher version of the carnival takes place in Sitges, where bars and nightclubs are attacked by revelers for several days.




2. Quebec in winter (Canada)
With average temperatures of -22 ° C in January over much of the territory and -10 ° C in the valley of the St. Lawrence, fi mosquitoes. But mostly, Quebec then ready amount of exhilarating activities: downhill skiing, dogsled rides and snowshoe equipped for cross country skiing or snowmobiling on the P'tit Train du Nord which connects St. Jérôme to Mont-Laurier (200 km). Thousands of skaters perform on the Rideau Canal, near Saint-Sauveur, or swirl on Beaver Lake Parc du Mont-Royal, right in Montreal. The hockey team of the city plays its matches in the splendid Bell Centre from October to May

Quebec has 150 ski track, 1 hour from Montreal and 30 minutes from Quebec City.




3 Rome summer (Italy) 
From late June to August, the Eternal City is experiencing a hot and humid climate, sometimes unbearable. But it's also the season when Rome is the liveliest and most sensual. People are in the streets and outdoor festivals abound; women go out dressed in divine robes; It serves gelati all day before having dinner on the terrace. Steeples of the capital of Christianity stand out in orange ocher on a generally blue sky. All invite to take the time to bask in the sun on the pavement cafes, to get lost in the cobbled streets and laze in the trattorias.



4 Reykjavík at midnight sun (Iceland)
Icelanders used to joke about the unpredictability of the climate of their country. However, the summer temperatures are generally correct and it is day 22 hours 24 driest and hottest months of the year, May, June and July are the best time to visit the country. The high season runs from early June to late August. The rest of the year, many galleries, museums and attractions in the capital have limited opening hours.

Reykjavik is expensive. Most accommodation and restaurants suitable for small budgets gathered in the west, in the old town.

France: places that have inspired painters -Part 3-

8 Site Corot, Saint-Junien (Haute-Vienne)

The municipality of Saint-Junien, in the far west of the department, has restored the "Chalet Corot" modest cottage in which the painter Jean-Baptiste Corot was storing his easel and brushes. This delicate landscape came every summer, in the middle of the nineteenth century, paint the sides of the Glane and its capricious waters. "Site Corot" steep and wooded, contains the memories of this precursor "despite his" Impressionist, a lone TV reception that perfectly transience of natural lighting. You can see his carved medallion and sealed in the rock portrait. A tribute in 1904 by local artists.


9 A Burial at Ornans, Gustave Courbet (Doubs)

A Burial at Ornans is the first monumental painting by Gustave Courbet, who painted between 1849 and 1850 From the outset, critics are many. It accuses the painter vulgarity but also to have dealt a "people story" in a large format usually reserved for so-called noble scenes. Courbet, who relies on having no other master in painting nature and tradition, becomes the leader of realism. Many paintings are inspired by his home town Ornans, nicknamed "Little Venice Grandfather." Crossed by Loue, it is full of charm with its old houses on stilts on the river.


 

10 Le Cannet Pierre Bonnard (Alpes-Maritimes)

From the window of his house, Pierre Bonnard admired ocher roofs of Le Cannet, the red cliffs of the Esterel and behind a green fringe, the blue of the Mediterranean. Landscapes, Le Cannet 1félicité illustrates the painter in his adopted homeland. "In light of the South, everything becomes clear and the paint is in full vibration," he wrote. He came regularly from 1922, then moved to the Villa Le Bosquet, purchased in 1926, where he resided until his death. Not far away, a museum dedicated to him. Outside, a walk invitation to follow the artist on the canal footpath Siagne.

                                                                         Source : lonelyplanet.fr 

France: places that have inspired painters -Part 2-

5 Sisley Moret-sur-Loing (Seine-et-Marne)

Near the forest of Fontainebleau, Moret is a quaint little town, with its tower and its vestiges of ramparts, Gothic church, old houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the old bridge over the Loing, a quiet river whose tributaries and channel crisscross the countryside. Its confluence with the Seine is not far either. Nothing has changed much since the Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) settled there in 1880 for nearly twenty years, he painted numerous views of the Loing, its channel and banks of the Seine, leaving a wide place in heaven and perspective effects highlighted by poplars.

Many artists today just find the atmosphere that inspired Sisley. Sisley course must be put in place and allow boats to go down over the water, surrounded by green sites.

 


6 Arles and Van Gogh (Bouches-du-Rhône)

Arles kept no Van Gogh painting. Yet it is here that the painter had a creative fury of excitement leading to exhaustion, to the brink of sanity. He spent a little over a year - from February 1888 to May 1889 - in the city where he painted some 185 canvases. Among the most famous: Sunflowers, The House Café Terrace at night and Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, linked to his altercation with Gauguin. It will then be transferred to the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Number of places he painted are still visible today.

The places where the artist has placed his easel are reported in the streets of Arles by panels representing his paintings.

 


7 Fresselines and the Valley of the Creuse (Creuse)

During the winter of 1889, Claude Monet set his easel at the confluence of two Creuse, at a place called The Battery, and before the mill Vervy. Its 23 tables will testify to the fascination of the master of Impressionism to the dark light and savagery of this border Indre Valley. Around Fresselines, Creuse, meandering, coves and cliffs, already mentioned by George Sand, will host the landscape painters of the school of Crozant. Today, the forest won on farmlands and heathland, but the mineral scenic beauty remains.

Fortress Crozant and promontory at the confluence of the Creuse and Sédelle, offers one of the points of view the most spectacular of the valley.

France: places that have inspired painters -Part 1-

From the nineteenth century, artists leave their studios and paying closer attention to the scenery. Getting into a table, it is possible by visiting the places where teachers set up their easels.
 
1. Monet's Water Lilies, Giverny (Eure)

Designed in ambition and incredible aesthetic philosophy at the time, the Water Lilies grow Impressionism to its absolute, while they are the swan song. If the contemplation of two circular sets offered by Claude Monet at the Orangerie Museum in Paris makes you want to continue the experience, it's Giverny you will find the descendants of the painter lilies floating in the pool that 'he laid in his garden by diverting an arm of the Epte. Monet was enamored with Giverny, and realized there, like a painting is produced, a sparkling flower garden that was his "workshop" in the second half of his life.

 


2 La Montagne Sainte-Victoire by Cezanne (Bouches-du-Rhône)

A total of 44 oils and 43 watercolors reflect the commitment of Cezanne Sainte Victoire. Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne quickly devoted himself to his passion: painting. Childhood friend of Émile Zola, with whom he traveled the Aix countryside, he will keep the memory of those years long walks in contact with nature. For twenty years, he will shuttle between Aix-en-Provence, L'Estaque and Paris, where he will never be able to win. Finally returned to Provence to paint the landscapes of his childhood, he fell out with Zola after the publication of artwork, inspired him to describe a cursed painter.

 


3 Views of Honfleur, Eugène Boudin (Calvados)

Eugène Boudin, a forerunner of Impressionism, first found his inspiration on the docks of the city where he was born, Honfleur. As such, Boudin is also the father of those artists who settled in Honfleur and elsewhere, their webs facing a landscape; Moreover he initiated Monet painting outdoors. Baudelaire, who was no stranger to the decision to follow his vocation Boudin, who began his career as a papermaker, proclaimed "King of the skies". The painter has made countless views of the harbor, houses and slate from the old port of Honfleur, who, in many ways, announce his fate town postcard; but different scenes, including market, show a more documentary look.

The Musée Eugène Boudin-presents more than 90 works by the artist but also paintings by Monet, Courbet and other artists.  






 
4 Le Moulin de la Galette (Paris)

Climb the Rue Lepic and see (near nos75-81) the last two mills, ancient and often rebuilt to Montmartre: The Blute-fin and Radet. In the 1860s, the owner added a tavern and a rustic ball, called Moulin de la Galette (note again the restaurant sign to that name near the mill Radet). The popular mood or rabble, these dances and dance halls, the charm of the hill and the old mills inspired many artists, starting with Renoir painted in 1876, his famous Bal au moulin de la Galette (silly ay, Musée d'Orsay), but also Van Gogh (1886), Toulouse-Lautrec (1889), Picasso (1900) and many others.






 

The most beautiful roads in the United States -Part 3-

8 Highway 2

The road linking the West Coast to the East Coast on the list must. Great Northern stretches 4,150 km between Washington State and the Maine in the north, making a detour to pass by Canada. Away from the big cities, it is lost in the great outdoors through beautiful landscapes, gorgeous mountains of the west with tantalizing Great Lakes through the vast prairies of the Great Plains. A small hook on the other side of the border to discover Montreal. The road then winds through mountains and forests to be completed on the coast of New England.

9 Blue Ridge Parkway

Under this name hides a beautiful scenic drive of 755 km long, stretching to the heart of misty mountains. Crossing the ridge of the southern Appalachians, it connects two great national parks: Shenandoah in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. Wildflowers popping up everywhere in the spring, while the fall colors are spectacular. But be careful driving on foggy days: lack of safety railing can then give cold sweats! If you're tired of driving, know that countless hiking trails await you too.
 


                                                                               Source : lonelyplanet.fr