let me tell you, it is completely ridiculous how a giraffe drinks. completely. they are too tall for their own good. "they're basically walking trees," said lizzy.
we also went on the carousel, which was delightful.
the tiger thing was pretty much the big joke of the day. lizzy and i are bad people in that we make light of others' grief and misfortune.
then . . . then we saw the real tiger. it was not scary, but we sort of pretended that it was, just for fun.
this isn't the real tiger, of course. the real tiger was shot to death with handguns by the police.
what there are not any pictures of:
how sad the silverback gorilla looked, and how we waved to him to try and cheer him up but he was having none of it and we realized he was way to smart to be cheered up by us pretending he is human
the giraffe frolicking while we stood on the monkey structure and talked about boys
the enormous rhinoceros which was pretty much a dinosaur except one third the size
i do however have one terrible photograph of the penguins.
they were trumpeting. it was ridiculous. pretty much they took turns sounding like donkeys. a guy in a nice suit with a really nice ankle-length wool coat came up to us and explained that they were looking for mates because mating season is at the end of this month. he pointed out the four youngest penguins, chicks conceived during last year's mating season, who don't have their tuxedos yet. i wanted to ask him why these chicks were so much bigger and fatter and clearly lazier than the other adult penguins, but with a swirl of his coat, he was gone. we talked about him for about half an hour after that - who was he? did he work there? wouldn't you wear rubber boots or a nametag if you worked at the zoo, or at least not really expensive clothes? lizzy said she thought he had a radio - maybe he was security, but in that case, why wasn't he wearing a uniform or a badge? was he some sort of high-up legal authority looking into big cat safety or the recent mauling? do high-up legal authorities have brooklyn accents, or know a ton about penguins? maybe. maybe they do. then we had a usual suspects moment where we realized everything he had told us was written on a sign attached to the penguin enclosure. so. i guess he was just a weirdo with a radio.
after that we went to the petting zoo. the usual goats standing on things and ignoring you if you don't have any food. when i was little i would get so excited because i thought all the goats were pregnant. i would run around to each of them to see if i could feel the baby kick. it was a real turning point for me when i realized they were all just really fat.
one of the highlights of the petting zoo was the birds of prey exhibit. we did not get to pet them, although we desperately wanted to. they were beautiful (except the turkey vulture, he was hideous. sorry frank. you are). my favorite was the eurasian eagle owl, "athena."
she was enormous and fluffy. i'm really bad with sizes, but i'm going to go ahead and say three feet tall and really, really fluffy, golden brown in a lot of places, pretty incredible. birds are strange because they move in really unfamiliar ways.
anyway, i'm going to get out of here and go to the cartoon art museum now to try and get out of the housekeeper's way.
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