Lille has a cute little zoo near the Citadelle with free entry. Considering this, I was quite impressed with the kinds of animals they had, including two white rhinos and a kinkajou, the first time I've seen these, quite a collection of American animals like tapirs, capybara (with babies), mara and macaws, and semi-exotics like red pandas and a fishing cat. I witnessed a small capuchin monkey teasing a baby pelican.
I'd budgeted the morning for the zoo but was struggling after just over one hour so went to the Palais des Beaux Arts. Upstairs they have European paintings from the 16th-20th century (and take particular pride in their Rubens—is the plural of Rubens 'Rubenses'?) but I found a lot of the paintings of religious saints gazing in agony during martyrdom boring compared to the temporary exhibition on Babel.
Photo of the day is a Tower of Babel made with books. No particular books, just lots of them. There were a lot of photo collages done by Chinese artists with tower-like structure showing the end of civilisation which were also striking, plus the original Bruegel, on loan from somewhere or other. I found the sculpture section interesting too.
I emerged from the museum a few hours later only to find that it had been a public holiday the whole time and a lot of the cafes and restaurants were closed. I ended up having a supermarket lunch by the fountain before going to meet Boff, who had won his afternoon game.
He wanted to see the zoo so we ended up walking there despite the fact that he thought I should be conserving energy to fight my lurgy (well, we had no choice as buses and taxis were scarce) and then ate dinner at a restaurant that used to be a porn cinema. It was one of very few open.
We decided to catch the metro back to the hotel and had these horrible children flock around us trying to steal our money without taking it from us. I put money in the ticket machine and a girl pressed the 'cancel' button and a boy shoved his hand in the return slot to grab it. Another girl stood nearby as a lookout, I'm guessing also to provide cover from CCTV. Luckily we were cluey enough to figure out what was happening so Boff covered the buttons so the girl couldn't press them and I guarded the return slot shoving the boy's hands out of the way shouting "ne touchez pas" (don't touch). Oh the irony: I didn't have enough French to swear at them.
No comments:
Post a Comment