Mid-Semester Break: Day 8/10

Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh my!

If you couldn't tell, I went to the Edinburgh Zoo today. Oh my gosh! It was so cool! I saw giant pandas! And penguins! And lions, tigers, and bears! Oh my!

Me pretending I am a penguin
outside the zoo, do
you think I will blend in? =]

Pelican! They're huge! At one
point a line of 4 of them was
following a little boy as he
 ran back and forth.
Cute! They were bigger
than him, too!

We spent so long there! Pretty much from 11:30 until 3. We got to see the giant pandas at 1pm. Their names are Tian Tian (Female) and Yang Guang (Male). They're visiting the Edinburgh zoo for ten years on loan from China. They're hoping to try to get the two to mate. Female pandas have only TWO DAYS OUT OF THE YEAR when they can mate. That is crazy! Pssh, human causing habitat destruction what? This is the REAL cause of their endangerment.

Tian Tian

Yang Guang

My other favorite part was, as you may be able to guess, the penguins. Unfortunately, they are remodeling the main penguin habitat, so only two of their three colonies were on display. I saw Gentoo and Rockhopper Penguins (but missed out on King Penguins =[ ). They were so cute! I even saw the rockhoppers being fed! Acgh! I was going to take one home with me, but then the zookeeper was there....

Gentoo Penguin, also my soulmate

Rockhopper Penguin

Some other cool animals I saw:

Swamp wallaby

Zebra

I think the wallaby is especially funny because I have heard that in Australia (where wallabies hail from) in one of their zoos they have sheep and hairy coos!

A really cute baby monkey!

Barbary Macaque

The zoo itself was absolutely gorgeous! I could wander around it all day!

The entire time we were at the zoo we were FREEZING though! This is partly because we had to walk a long way to get there. We thought the bus would drop us right in front of the zoo, as it normally does, but then it didn't! So we walked. And were freezing. Although the day warmed up a bit, we were pretty much left over cold from the morning the entire time.

Then, on the bus on the way back, it snowed. IT SNOWED IN OCTOBER! Which reminded me of last October and Halloween weekend when there was the ridiculous snowstorm. But I was refusing to put on my winter jacket because it was October and I did not like the principle of it. So I walked around in the snowstorm with a normal jacket on, going to work and delivering cupcakes and all that fun stuff! Some people thought I was crazy, I think. 

I then finished the really good rice I made last night, which as I mentioned in the last post, was not as good the second time around, but still yummy.