A visit to the Jardins des Plantes

Note: Please welcome Matt, my husband and fellow traveler to The Mother of All Trips. – Mara

Today I took les garcons off to play at the Jardins des Plantes, a very large public garden just around the corner from our apartment. We started with a visit to the Menagerie, the world’s oldest zoo (est. 1794). The boys enjoyed seeing all the animals and I had fun seeing their housing. Instead of faux natural settings or depressing cinder block cells, these animals live in a bit of style. The mountain goats, for instance, eat their feed from the windows of a tiny Palladian villa. And zoo keepers were aggressively cleaning the habitats with brooms and buckets, so the animals enjoy a Paris that is as clean as the rest of the city.

We zipped home for lunch, then returned in the afternoon to take in the Musée Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle, Paleontologie et Anatomie Comparée. The idea was to enjoy some dinosaur-related stuff, but as with the amusement park in the Bois de Boulogne the experience was somewhat different than it might have been in the U.S. As we stood in the short, but slow, line to buy tickets, I was hoping the boys wouldn’t notice the statue next to us. Then Tommy said, “Daddy, that statue kind of scares me.”

The statue to which he was referring was eight feet tall and featured a giant orangutan standing on top of a nude man. The orangutan had its hands wrapped tightly around the man’s neck, choking him to death while a baby orangutan screamed in delight beside him. There was a deep gash in the man’s arm that corresponded to a deep gash in the big orangutan’s belly, out of which its guts were spilling. A knife lay on the ground at the man’s feet (hence one could piece together the narrative of this unfortunate encounter quite easily).

Happily, Teddy did not notice the statue, but he was simply saving his discomfort for when we got into the museum. It was warranted. Greeting us as we entered was a statue representing a human with his skin removed, the better to show off all the creepy veins and muscles (with a fig leaf discreetly draped over his most sensitive muscle). And the interior was an old-world affair: the perimeter of the huge gallery was lined with glass cases filled with skulls, pickled brains, lungs, and other bits of interesting animals. In the center were the skeletons of everything from kangaroos to dinosaurs. We trouped through the whole museum despite Teddy’s refrain of, “I don’t like this museum. I wanna go.” But he was a sport, and I rewarded him with a cute dinosaur t-shirt to remember the visit by.

At the end, the boys rode a carousel outside that mingled extinct animals with surviving species, the better to compare their anatomy, I guess.

Exterior photo courtesy of RiffRaff via Flickr.

Museum photo courtesy of Gilles Couteau via Flickr.