Monday Menagerie

On Mondays we have to vacate the apartment so the cleaning lady can do her thing. Eric went for sushi, and I took Ella to the world's first public zoo at the Jardin de Plantes.

After Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were imprisoned, the new regime seized the animals from their menagerie at Versailles and brought them to the Jardin for the public to enjoy. And since Eric wasn't with us, I took all the photos and actually have them in this post for you to enjoy!

I'm not sure if this statue was also from Versailles.
It's not often you're greeted at a zoo by a savage hunter wielding a severed bear head.

Here, Ella does a flamingo pose in front of the flamingos.


A very popular exhibit: raccoons all the way from North America!


Ella preferred the mammoth statue to the hunter statue,
especially since we recently saw Ice Age 3 (also known as L'Age de Glace).


This Orangutan was earning his keep by washing the windows.


For those Harry Potter fans, Hedwig summers in Paris.

I guess it's poetic that the hunter eventually becomes the hunted.
Oh the drama ...

The other drama happened when we got home at 4 p.m. and the cleaning hadn't been done, yet. Fortunately or unfortuately, she arrived at 4:30 -- just as I was starting a session with a client! Oh well, at least we have a clean toilet.