CITROEN PARC

CITROEN PARC LIZ SAYS: Out in the middle of what Dick calls Toyota City, is Parc Citroen. We decided to go see the people’s park reclaimed from an old Citroen Plant. I have to say, I know the old fashioned Citroens with the cloth roof and the big hot rod-ish car that Dick says had air lifts for something or other. But, I had to defer to him to conjure up when we see the caars. He says they are the black cars with black windows that shuttle around ministers and such, sorta the Crown Royale of French cars. They have had their moments, but I would not say now it is not one of them. People don’t sit at cafes and point out Citreons. So, a factory closed down in the 1970’s and they made it into a park in the 1990’s. It was the coolest park, in that, I could feel the factory’s existence in the angles and levels and lines of concrete that separated a lot of water from all sorts of greenery. There were rooms to picnic or play or commune with what or whoever in the grass, with tall wisps of decorative grass and hanging willows in between. They made several nods to the water fowl and had garden rooms of people doing all sorts of constructive and friendly things. It was relaxing and invigorating. One of the really groovy features is the Air Paris Baloon, it is a baloon that you can ride. And, you can see it from various vantage points in the city and it always looks like it is near the Eiffel Tower. There was a huge glass botanical garden, which we saved for another time. Visually, whole thing was surrounded by the glass boxes and slight variations of the past 4 decades, which actually gleamed in the distance when you were so close to all that water and foliage. In reality, those buildings were much further away and the place was actually surrounded by cafes and restaurants, which made it pretty easy to dodge the intermittent sprinkling and get some coffee under cover.