My life could handle more giant mechanical elephants...

Bam! Check this picture out! Do you know what that is?

If you, through some incredible feat of intellect and insight guessed "giant mechanical/robot elephant" (not that the title of this post would give that away at all), then you are indeed correct. Good job.

You may be wondering where in the world I had the good fortune to run into such a fabulous creature. Those of you who know me (I'm guessing this is all of you, because I'm pretty sure this is not the kind of blog complete strangers read for fun), or those of you have taken more than 2 seconds to look at this blog would probably be astute enough to guess that this probably happened in France. Those of you who know where Mayenne is (I'm guessing this is, in fact, very few of you), might even be able to guess that it is somewhere in western France.

The answer is that I got to see this incredible machine in Nantes, a city which is not that far from where I live and which I got to visit this past week. A French teacher at my high regularly drives down to Nantes on Wednesdays because she does some work for the Musée des Beaux Arts down there. When I first got here at the beginning of the year she told me that if I ever wanted to see Nantes, she would be happy to take me with her sometime. I stored this information in the back of my head, but I did not take advantage of such an opportunity until this week. I have two friends in Laval who also happen to have Wednesdays off, so I invited them to come along as well and we all went down to Nantes.

When we got there, it was, surprisingly, raining (gee! Rain in the winter in France? How peculiar!). Although we walked through the city a bit, we decided to stick to the museums and we settled on visiting the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle and something called "Les Machines de l'Île".

I love Natural History museums. I especially love natural history museums in France and here is why: French natural history museums always seem universally to be the result of over-zealous 19th century French Naturalists. I think the reason why most of the museums exist is that in the 19th century a bunch of naturalists traveled the world over collecting and labeling rocks, killing and stuffing all manner of small animal, and pickling whatever else they could get their hands on all in the name of science. The problem was, that once they got back they realized that there was no where to put all of their carefully caught and labeled "specimens", and a national system of natural history museums was established to resolve the problem. In these museums everything was carefully arranged by genus and by the region that the specimen came from, carefully labeled by hand and then was promptly forgotten by the rest of mankind. I'm serious, in many of these museums the specimens still have the original labeling:

And this is what I loved about them--they have a slighty dusty and forgotten air, like things hastily stuck in drawer and forgotten about. It is as if they were remanants of some obsessive collection that you had years ago and that got placed in a closet somewhere and that you rediscovered while trying to find something completely unrelated. I love them.

Les Machines de L'Île held yet a completely different kind of exciting thing although this place too had a strange sort of 19th century feel to it which probably had to with the design and workmanship of the structure found within. It is the workshop of a company that makes giant mechanical puppets that are used around the work in spectacles and shows (here is their website). The cool thing about these puppets is they are a fusion of high tech machinery with old-school craftsmanship and attention to detail--the elephant can lift its trunks, move its eyes and eyelids, ears, etc.

Unluckily for us, the elephants was not working the when we went to visit, but we did get to see the workshop and some of the puppets that they were preparing for an a sea them carousel. You can see some of the highlights of the exhibit to the right. The coolest things about these machines is how much the builders paid attention to detail. For example, the tentacles of the squid have so many different points of articulation that when the do move they really do resemble tentacles. It is amazing.

You may wondering how it is that I know how these machines look when they are moving. This is because we had the good luck to be there when they were giving demonstrations of the way the machines work, and so we got to see them in action. We even got the chance to ride a couple of them ourselves!

Liz, a good friend of mine got the courage to volunteer first and as a reward for her boldness got to ride in this sweet Angler fish (right). The thing is actually pretty awesome when it moves--the light at the end of its antenna lights up and it can blow mist. In fact, you should check out the video of Liz riding the thing (or "wrangling the angler", as I like to say).
I was, on the other hand, slightly less bold than Liz. This meant that I nearly missed an opportunity entirely to ride one of the fabulous contraptions. Lucky for me, they were giving a demonstration of one of the machines that was designed for kids only, but they didn't have enough kids in the audiences, and so they aske for some adults to fill in. I leapt on the opportunity and volunteered immediately, the result being that it was me and a bunch of terrified small children on a ride that was somewhat less exciting that Liz's. In the pictures I look like some sort of giant interloper. Still, I am happy to have had the experience.

Anyhow, those were probably the highlights of my Nantes trips. The machines are well worth the visit, and I would highly recommend them to anyone who is in the area.

The rest my week went pretty well as well--the highlights were one of student saying that my hour of teaching English went by so much faster than their hour with their regular teacher (I wanted to do an air fist-pump, but I resisted) and managing to hang out with some more French people this weekend. I even got to watch the Miss France Pageant on TV! (In case you were wondering, Miss Normandy won--or I guess I should say Meees Normandie.)