Bois de Boulogne

This post is going to have a lot of pictures because I spent the rest of the day in an extremely photogenic place, the Bois de Boulogne. The Bois is a large wooded area on the west end of Paris; it is evidently where Paris goes to exercise, because I saw many runners and bicyclists, including some impossibly adorable small children on small bikes. (The kids wear helmets, although most of the adults do not.) There are two lakes, numerous ponds, several waterfalls, and many, many lovely paths to follow.

The park does hold some perils, including dangerous trees and the risk of floods. I like the exclamation points in the signs.

(The trees looked perfectly benign to me, so I'm not sure in what way they were dangerous, and on the day we were there, the risk of a flooded roadway seemed vanishingly small.) All in all, the park is an idyllic setting. The Parc de Bagatelle contains perhaps the greatest concentration of sheer beauty and lovely views. Food, however, is a little hard to find; the first two restaurants we sought out, following a knife and fork symbol on the map, turned out to be costlier and swankier than we had in mind, and we somewhat irritably retraced our steps to find a smaller place that sold sandwiches and crepes. However, good humor was restored when we ran across this guy on the way.

I had never seen a peacock before, and I was greatly impressed by his gorgeous blue color. If I were a peahen, I would not need to see his tail; the lovely iridescent sheen of his chest would be enough. However, being a human, I was sort of curious about what his tail would look like in its full glory, but I didn't get to see it. I think without a peahen around, the peacock doesn't bother unfurling the thing, and the peahens we saw were off in the grass away from the peacocks. Still, the peacocks were a glorious sight; we saw several others as we traveled around in the park. Here's a better view of the tail.

They really are remarkable animals.

Some sort of Chopin festival is beginning today, and I got to hear a couple of young pianists playing Chopin and Liszt in the Orangerie in the Bois de Boulogne. The Orangerie is near the rose garden, which was full of the most amazing array of roses in a range of lovely shades. It was quite pleasant to stroll among the roses on a June afternoon, echoes of Chopin and Liszt running through my head, surrounded by people equally entranced by the roses who all stopped to admire, photograph, and sniff. There is something very endearing about the actions of people who appear to be motivated solely by the love of something beautiful.

In addition to the roses, the Parc de Bagatelle contained a giant sequoia, a Douglas fir, and a cedar of Lebanon (and of course many other flowers and shrubs). There were ducks and the ubiquitous pigeons as well as peacocks. I joined several of the children near the sandwich place in throwing crumbs to the birds, and the guy at the sandwich place made a bunch of pigeons very happy by brushing a great shower of crumbs off the counter to the ground. To cap it all off, there was even a swan.

I don't suppose it gets much better than this, but tomorrow I am going to visit the Pantheon and the Musée Cluny in the Latin Quarter, so who knows?