Circus Circus

Thursday, September 16 2010

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the final night of a 3-week visit by the Circus KNIE in Geneva.  It was conveniently located 35 seconds from our home in the Plainpalais "park".  If we haven't explain why we use quotations around "park" in reference to Plainpalais, it's because a map of Geneva labels the area in green, which would normally depict a grassy park.  However, the park itself is a clay/gravel surface built above an underground parking garage.  Since we arrived here, it's been used for markets and events, such as the circus.

A word of warning before you read on, if you've ever been to a circus before you probably won't read any groundbreaking revelations here.  As you already know, the animals are cute and the acts are crazy! :)

This was the first real, authentic circus for both of us (at least that we can remember) so we were quite curious of what it was all about.  The one thing we did know going into it is that there were plenty of animals-- we would walk by the park on our way to work each day and would see many of the animals hanging around in their pens.  So we showed up early to the circus to have some time to visit all of them: horses, llamas, goats, pot-bellied pigs, ponies, zebras, camels & elephants.

One of the biggest surprises for us was how tame and approachable the animals were!  It didn't occur to us until later that pretty much every animal we saw before the show made an appearance later that night, so clearly they needed to be tame.  Some animals were friendlier than others.  The llamas didn't want anything to do with us.  The horse you see with Dave below looooved attention-- almost to the point where we felt bad saying goodbye.  The camels weren't necessarily friendly, but were very accessible for petting.  The elephants were a kick!  When we first saw them, they were huddling close and kind of swaying in a dancing motion while tossing bark on themselves (see the video below).  It was quite entertaining.  Who would have thought we'd each pet an elephant in our lifetime?  Let alone have one suck on each of our hands via the end of it's trunk-- it was great.

We noticed that many of the animals approached us sniffing, and sometimes nibbling, at our hands.  We knew they were looking for food, but we didn't realize until later during the show how dependent they are on treats.  During the show, the trainers were constantly slipping each animal a little something after a correct sequence of moves.  It makes sense though, because these animals have been trained to do some pretty complex stunts, and of course many of us can attest that the best reward system is food. :)

Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take photos or film during the circus performance-- which is a bummer, because we'd love to share how incredible the acts were (aside from the "filler" comedy acts which, as you can guess, were 100% in French...we just smiled and nodded).  The agility, stamina & sheer-fearlessness of these crazy people was quite impressive.  If you ever have the opportunity to check a circus out, we definitely recommend it!