When Anca insisted on going to Nantes to see their exhibit of mechanical animals, I was skeptical, because it sounded kind of kitschy to me... like, all the elegance of a Chuck E. Cheese. Boy was I wrong: it turns out Nantes is a bit of an industrial center, and it has some engineers with artistic inclinations. Kind of like the MIT Media Lab, but with mechanical engineering instead of computers. So they made some seriously cool steam-punk animals... like a zoo designed by Jules Verne and Terry Gilliam. The “flag ship” of the menagerie is a 40-foot tall elephant that can take 4 dozen passengers for a half-hour tour, while moving not just its legs but also ears, eyes, trunk, and tail, and trumpeting at an ear-splitting volume. They have a carousel too, which Anna rode of course (twice!). See looooves carousels.