Today I finally went to the Philadelphia Zoo.
I like zoos. I know a lot of people have issues with them, but I don’t as long as the animals are well taken care of. And it means I can see cute fluffy things I wouldn’t normally be able to see. It’s all about the cute fluffies.
Like the firefox!
I met up with
The weather was so nice, not too hot, and quite sunny. We bought our tickets and went into the zoo.
First saw a Red Kangaroo (so cute! but it lived with emus, ew), went into all the little houses, the reptile house was awsome, snakes and turtles are my favorite, and they had some amazing specimens. While leaving the reptile house we noticed that the sky had gotten dark and cloudy.
We figured a little rain wouldn’t hurt, so continued our tour of the zoo. Saw the hippos and when getting close to the elephants, the sky opened up and it started pouring.
We got wet, but it was still fun!
The elephants were some of my favorites. The two asian elephants seemed to love the rain and took the opportunity to play in their pool. Swimming elephants are GREAT! They came pretty close to the edge of their enclosure (causing some kids to scream with fear of how close), and they’d dive in the water, splash around, and just be all around entertaining. It was great to watch, I’d never seen elephants be so unprovokingly playful.
Then we saw the primates, the best part being the gorillas, where the zookeepers had put identical crates on the gorilla side of the glass and the people side. Watching from above the similarites between young children climbing on the boxes and young gorillas what surreal. I’m sure this was intentional.
Then we got to see the penguins! Yay! They were happy in the rain too, swimming in a “flock” around their pool. I wanted to give them hugs %)
The rain was still coming down in spurts, but we got around to see the bears, a snow leopard (so cute!), 3 adorable cheetahs, and possibly my favorite animal in the zoo – the red panda (firefox), who was so cute in it’s little enclosure! His fur was wet, but he was so fluffy and cute that I wanted to give him hugs too. Unfortunately the big cats (lions, tigers) were living at another zoo while their enclosures were being redone, so we didn’t get to see them.
By the time we had finished seeing all the animals the rain was really coming down. About halfway to the main gate I realized that I was completely drenched from head to toe, and that we had no towels or anything to dry up with before getting into
I had a really great time though, the rain managed to clear a lot of people out of the zoo, so it wasn’t as crowded as it would have been otherwise. And
And now Michael and I are going drum shopping! And it’s raining today too, but I’m bringing my raincoat this time ;)