Carnival in Tuileries Gardens

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Twice a year, a small itinerant carnival comes to the northern side of the Tuileries Gardens in the center of Paris. It’s pretty much your typical travelling fair, with rides, lots of fattening but tasty snack foods and drinks, various games of skill with prizes, and so on. This carnival is popular with Parisians, and visits the city once in the summer and once in the winter, for a few weeks each year.

The photo above shows the modest midway of this carnival during its summer season, on a very warm July night. It resembles what you’d see at a lot of other similar fairs, with a scary ride< on the left, a pizza vendor and beverage vending machines on the right, a skill game with prizes behind that, and more rides and restaurants in the distance, including both a flume ride decorated by a giant gorilla (barely visible in the exact middle of this photo), and a bizarre attraction that catapults two people inside a capsule to a height of 20 stories in just one second (an acceleration of six gravities), which the operators call an “ejection seat” for obvious reasons (visible as the two ten-story towers with lights on top in the distance).

Although it is not obvious here, this carnival is right next to the Louvre museum (behind the camera), and the Champs-Élysées is less than a kilometre away, straight ahead (but not actually visible in the photo).

Photographed on July 29, 2001.