On our last day in Paris, we were walking back to our hotel to pick up our bags before going to the airport (they were kind enough to store them for us for the day even though we had checked out), and we were walking through a park and saw a game of "bowling". We were excited to see this, because our tour guide book had mentioned it, but he just said you had to be "lucky" to catch one, so we sat down on a bench to watch. I looked this up online and found out that in France they call it "petanque" and it is similiar to British lawn bowling, or Italian bocce. It is played with metallic balls on dirt and a cochonnet. A cochonnet is a small object usually made of beech wood and is 1 - 1 3/8" in diameter. A cochonnet may be stained but not painted. Each player has 3 balls The object is to throw your balls - usually with somewhat of an arched back-spin - so that they land closer to the cochonnet than those of your opponent, or strike and drive the object ball toward your other balls and away from your opponents balls. The group we saw playing were mostly older men, but we saw another group of younger men (30's) a little ways away. The older men also had strong magnets attached to ropes or cords that they could hang over their metallic balls and thus pick them up without having to bend over to get them. :0) These pictures turned out bluish for some reason. It was either because the camera was on the wrong setting, or because our battery was about dead by then.
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