We just finished filming two new TV shows on Paris ' 12 days of work. I was exhausted when we were done, but ' I have to admit ' in Paris it's hard to call it "work." Rather than hard working, let's call it hard living.

One of the great perks of TV production is the luxury of being alone with Europe's greatest art. A few weeks before we came to film, I scouted Paris' Orangerie Museum and developed a concept of strolling with Monet along the banks of his water lily pond. When I returned with the film crew, we commandeered a wheelchair to use as a "poor man's dolly" (in good guerilla-budget public television style), allowing us to capture that smooth "stroll along the pond" effect for our viewers ' in hi-def!

Here's a bit of my script for that part of our Paris show, followed by a video of cameraman Karel and producer/wheelchair dolly operator Simon in action:

Like an aging Beethoven, who composed his most dramatic works while losing his hearing, the nearly blind Claude Monet spent his last years painting these symphonies of color on a similarly monumental scale.

We're looking into his pond ' dotted with water lilies, surrounded by foliage, and dappled by the reflections of the sky, clouds, and trees on the surface. Monet mingles the pond's many elements and lets us sort it out.

The true subject of these works is not the pond itself. It's the play of the light reflecting off the water. Monet would work on several canvases at the same time ' each one catching the light of a particular time of day.

If you can't see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/index.cfm?fuseaction=entry&entryID=688