Paris holiday III

I haven’t written about food in a while and I promise I will but I have another diversion first. On Tuesday I talked about our visit to the Jardin D’Acclimatation, which was at one time one of three zoos in Paris. It was established to acclimatize (and domesticate?) exotic animals in the Bois de Boulougne, a huge park at the western edge of Paris. The  Paris zoo in the Bois de Vincennes in the southeastern corner of the city is the big zoo where the scientific research is based. It has large spaces for large animals and while it isn’t easy to get to, it is one of the better zoos that we’ve seen. 

The third zoo is the Menagerie, a delightful little zoo located in the Jardin des Plantes. The Jardin, situated between the Latin Quarter and Gare d’Austerlitz in the 6eme arrondisement, was established for the king to show off his animals and landscaping skills in a royal menagerie and royal gardens. It was repurposed for public and scientific uses after the French Revolution and remains that way today. In addition to the Menagerie, there is the Museum of Natural History, a rock garden focused on mountain plants, galleries of mineralogy, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and evolution, summer and winter gardens, greenhouses, a school,of botany, and plenty of space for Parisians to have lunch, run, rollerblade, push baby strollers, sunbathe, and escape from the hurly burly of city life. Like everything in Paris, it is designed with a sense of grace and elegance.  Here, some of the wildness of NY’s Central Park or Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park might be considered impolite.

The Menagerie, which costs only 13€, is pretty intimate. The largest animals are yaks and Asian buffaloes. The enclosures are small enough to give visitors a good look at the animals but are large enough to give the animals a sense of privacy and security. Sometimes the animals enjoy the stimulus of interacting with visitors, like the orangutan in the feature picture.  Other times, it seems they prefer a more a look relationship.

One special feature of the Menagerie is a small building where they have baby hatchlings on display.  Yesterday they showed a four day old pheasant, a pair of vulture siblings that were about two weeks old and a rambunctious ostrich baby about eight inches tall.  Since my true love and I helped manage the birth of two parakeet clutches a few years back, this room has a special attraction to us.  I’d love to show a picture of the four day old, but it’s features weren’t developed enough to show up in a picture so I’ll share the vulture instead. 

We spent a few hours in the Menagerie, left for lunch, came back to visit a couple of animals we missed and then left for the Jardin Alpin.  This garden was created in the early 1930s to showcase mountainous plant life. Samples are drawn from, among other places, the Alps, the Balkans, and the Himalayas.  It’s set in a space that is several feet below grade (strange to showcase mountain greenery below grade, no?) which creates a unique sense of serenity.  What adds to the sense of calm is that the construction of the garden is very subtle. It’s really more of a rock garden, with the plants sparsely complementing the rocks. We visited on a day that was much cooler than our first couple of days here.  A lovely day altogether.

As we decided it was time to head “home” for dinner, we got back on our bus and settled in the the right. Before signing off on today’s post, I want to give props to Paris’ buses. Everyone loves Paris’ metro and many think it’s the best in the world. The metro gets you almost anywhere fairly quickly on clean, safe trains (are you listening Philadelphia?). The problem with the metro is that you don’t see anything. On a bus, you get to watch the people and buildings of places you’d never ordinarily visit. On this particular day we took a bus home that brought us through some neighborhoods in the 13eme arrondisement that we hadn’t seen before. It took a little longer but was well worth it.