When we feel like it, we will post photos of Le Prof posing in exciting Mystery Locations in Paris. The Mystery Location will always be a place accessible to the public--no sneaking around inside private backyards and asking you to identify them! The winner of each contest will be the first person to comment, on the blog, by email, or on Facebook, with a correct identification of the location. The person who correctly identifies the most mystery locations by June 30 will win renown and, possibly, if travel funds and luggage space allow, a tiny prize!
Rules:
1. Each individual contest will last one week, or until a winner wins, whichever comes first.
2. If you were with us when the photo was taken, you may not participate in that installment of the contest, though the rest are fair game. That, I'm afraid, is the price of hanging out with us.
3. If nobody wins within a few days, we will post a clue. Or two, maybe.
4. If we decide to issue a prize, it will be of our choosing. Le Radeau de la Méduse will not fit in our luggage, and besides, it is currently on loan.
5. "France" is a correct answer; it will not win you the contest. We reserve the right to determine what is and isn't sufficiently specific.
6. EDIT: You are on your honor not to figure it out with a Google Image search, otherwise there's no point to the contest at all, and nobody will win a tin of prune-stuffed prunes.
Mystery Location #1: Where's Karl?
Answer: the grotto of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont
Winner: Anne!
Le Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a lovely and strange public garden in the 19th arrondissement, opened in 1867. It was previously the site of a gypsum and limestone quarry. You can see where the quarry concept led to.
Commissioned by Napoleon III, it was the work of engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, horticulturist Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, and architect Gabriel Davioud. The whole project was overseen by Baron Haussmann.
It is extravagantly lovely and bizarre. It undoes all your preconceptions about French gardening. Stalactites!
More pictures available on our Flickr collection, Parc des Buttes Chaumont.
Here is Karl on the bridge to the belvedere of the Sibyl. We didn't see the Sibyl. See the little folly in the background? That's the same folly seen in the picture above.
Thanks Anne, and thanks to everybody for participating! We will post our next contest at 1 pm EST on Sunday. AND...we will be providing the clue at the same time, so ready your mad research skills now.
In the land of Faerie?
ReplyDeletein the shower of your fabulous Paris apartment?
ReplyDeleteThe shower of our fabulous Paris apartment is the Land of Wary. I think the last time I cleaned it was when Liza was here. Oh wait--I didn't actually get around to cleaning it before Liza got here.
ReplyDeleteIn front of the drooling, sputtering mouth of God.
ReplyDeleteAh, could it be the grottoes of the Buttes Chaumont, once a pig farm, but under Haussman's vivid imagination a park also sporting a Temple to Venus on a hill? (the ice cream stands there are really good, too!)
ReplyDeleteResearch? No, that's not my theory. Nonetheless, I'm excited about the next contest!
ReplyDeleteYipee! These are such marvelous photographs. April in Paris indeed - wow!
ReplyDelete