France: Lyon 31/10

Yes I know I have two 31/10. This is because I usually write the blog the morning after and yesterday I put the actual date. Yesterday we decided that we needed some greenery and caught the bus and tram up to Parc de la Tete d' Or or in English the Golden Park. It is France's largest park of the developed variety. It has a huge lake created by closing up a curve of the Rhone. There are walk trails, cycle paths, aboritum, a botanic garden and a Zoo. We walked to the lake first and then circled back to the Zoo. This is relatively small and seems to specialise in threatened species in conjunction with a European wide progamme. The animals were well set up with vegetation appropriate to their natural environment and cozy dens to keep warm in winter. Depite the cold weather ( it was raining but not heavily) many of them were out and about. The only ones we didn't see were the bears. Maybe they are thinking about hibernating. Most fun was that all the animals had big yellow pumpkins in their enclosures for Halloween and most of them seemed to be enjoying them. We learnt that the zebras have stripes on their backsides of different widths depending on whether they come from the riverlands, the plains or the hills areas. The ones we saw were from the hill country. The panther was a most magnificent creature and even he was eating pumpkin. The lion was unusual in that he was an Asian one from India. Very vulnerable status as you can imagine.
From there we walked through the Botanic Gardens.  In the greenhouse they had lots of pitcher plants and sundews including examples that we find on our property and acknowledged as SW of WA.
By then we had been about three hours and it was time for lunch and a rest. Last night we adopted a different strategy to look for dinner and were successful in finding a decent restaurant with a waiter who was prepared to translate the menu for us. The French don't seem to believe in green veges except in their spinach quiches. Last night we opted for mashed potato as it was the first time we had seen it as an alternative to fries. We also agreed to pay a Euro each extra to have vegetables as well and were served half a small yellow squash and a piece of what I think was chinese radish. Have the broccoli and beans  ready for when we get home girls. Despite that the food was good  and we went home replete.