van Gogh's hood

Auvers-sur-Oise is a lil' bitty town just out of Paris that has been made famous because it is where Monsieur Vincent van Gogh spent his last suicidal months and, consequently, is the final resting place of both himself and his lil' bro Theo.

My advice to those traveling from Paris to Auvers-sur-Oise : look up the train info online! And ask for help. Our blind faith our guide book instructions really screwed up our day trip. We lost a good 2 hours or more being lost and waiting for trains. Don't you feel bad for us now?

Anywhooo...it was still seriously cool getting to walk along the same streets as Vincent and see some of the famous imagery from his work. The Church Auvers-sur-Oise, the wheat fields...

In the two months before his death in Auvers-sur-Oise he painted over 70 pictures and the town has positioned some of these works on plaques next to the actual structures so you can compare them with how they look today. Pretty sweeeeeet.

If you go to the Ravoux Inn you can take a tour of both the inn and the immediate area of sites important to van Gogh's local history. On the upper floor of the inn you can view the bed where van Gogh lay after shooting himself in the stomach. He died there 2 days later, on July 27, 1890, with Theo at his side. His last words were said to be: "La tristesse durera toujours" (French for "the sadness will last forever"). He was 37.

Poor Theo by this point was in the final stages of syphilis and, days after Vincent's death, was himself admitted into a hospital. He died six months later on 25 January at Utrecht. In 1914 Theo's body was exhumed and re-buried beside Vincent.