The Running Park

The Parc Saint-Nicolas

This is the park I run to when I get up the motivation to run in the mornings. It is a spectacular place. I have heard that to make the full loop around the water you would have to continue along this trail for 14 kilometers. We have only explored a couple offshoots of the main trail, but there are a lot, and it is so beautiful!

Along the trail there are all sorts of fun things. There is this little "cave"...

..and a little waterfall..

..a playground..

..and some animals. It reminds me of Willow Park in Logan. They dont really have any spectacular animals, bt its fun to walk around and see them.

The flash made this goat look evil, but he's my favorite goat. :)

This is double chin pig. The pigs at the park are all impressively large..

The Bambis! As we were taking pictures of these guys, a little French girl ran up yelling to here dad," Papa! Les Bamabis!" It was cute.

Thats a mountain goat up there. This one liked to climb.

This one had long hair.. he seemed to be the boss. 

There is a little pond in the middle, you have to walk down the stairs to get to it. Its very pretty. Theres a couple little waterfalls running into it. This is where the swan lives.

...The angry swan. He's pretty grumpy and not very grateful! We took him some bread once, and he wouldn't eat it.. but he does like to try and bite your shoes, and hands, and the wooden fence.

These pictures are from a Saturday when we went for a walk. It was a very nice day. When we got to the cave, the clouds started rolling in and we started to worry it would rain. We had our umbrella so we still werent in a hurry to leave. When it started to rain we decided we better get home, and by the time we got to the exit of the park it started pouring, then started hailing, and then came the thunder and lightening. It was wild! Even with our umbrella we got soaked. It took us about 15 minutes to get home and by the time we reached our house the rain had stopped and the sun was coming out again. I guess that is normal for this time of year!

Things are still going well here. School is getting more intensive as the semester is progressing. Im starting to think that taking 4 translation classes wasn't the greatest idea! Its been fun though. We had our winter vacation but we just stayed home. We are saving up to buy a France rail pass here in the next couple of months.

Kennan has been writing a lot! He has lots of good ideas for stories and he's been happy to have the time to start writing them down and developing them into stories. He isi picking up some French and the people in the ward are always excited to hear how he is progressing.

A few saturdays ago we went to the indoor ice rink, "patinoire" in French. It was pretty fun. We also visited a exposition at the Musee de Beaux Arts called Vu-Pas-Vu (Seen not seen). The artist had used lights and glass and other materials and arranged them so that just looking at them it looked like a pile of broken glass, or random things but when the light shown on it, it created a reflection on the wall behind it. It was pretty impressive.  

Us infront of the patinoire

I was shutting our shutters the other day and saw a reverse lady bug. I thought it was cool and wanted to share it with everyone. :) We have also seen some bugs that look like box elder bugs but they have a different design on their wings.

Well, thats all for now!