Pretty Reminiscences

I love carousels and have had a love for them since a child visiting Balboa Park in San Diego (my grandparents lived in San Diego). I really loved the San Diego Zoo too, and the carousel was just outside, and had real antique carousel animals and real brass rings you could try to reach (and if you did you got a prize !).

Here is a carousel in Paris, just below Sacre Coeur up in Montmartre. It was lovely and lit up at dusk, with real antique animals, and check out the leaping horse at the top of the carousel. Magical !

In Prague, I saw this newer carousel, inside a shopping centre and with a lovely white horse with a grey mane with sea blue and orange colors on its saddles.

And then I saw an antique carousel horse in Virginia City Nevada, in the window of an antique seller. It is very pretty, but perhaps a bit sad to be parted from its original partners ? Maybe it will be happy when it goes to a new home, rather than wait in a shop window. If it could have been easier for me to ship it home, I might have considered acquiring it myself !

And this last animal is a carved animal, polar bear with a Father Christmas, seen in a shop window in the old town of Vilnius. I really like polar bear figures (and I have a Steiff polar bear I bought in Germany over 25 years ago). I wish I had had more time to send this one home...but with 4 weeks of biz travel ahead of me, it did not seem practical. What a great centrepiece this would make for a holiday table !

I don't think I want to stop photographing these sorts of carved statuettes and images, they have sweet adorable expressions and are decorated with lovely detail. Decorative art in their own right, and provoking imagination too. These figures have a magical presence to them that is very appealing.