Today, Angela, Kayla, Nick, and I decided to go to the zoo
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| Hey, you can see Christina on top of the sign! |
Somewhere in this park, there's a beautiful and elusive animal. Natively found in Africa, we San Diegans are lucky enough to have one grace us with its presence in our very own zoo. Hailed as a divine being in some cultures, it is the epitome of elegance.
It calls itself the "Dik-Dik." And I was on the hunt to find it today.
The first thing we did was take the skytram to the other side of the park. The first animal we saw was unfortunately, not the Dik-Dik, but this guy:
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| It looks like a living kiwi. |
This cute little guy is called a peccary, a member of the pig family with prickly-looking fur surrounding his entire family. He deserves special recognition for being the unofficial welcoming animal for the first annual Kamichan zoo trip. Good on you, friend!
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| Congratulations! |
Of course, with the 3,700 different species in the zoo, I couldn't afford to photoshop top hats on all of them nor can I upload pictures of all of them, so I'll post the highlights.
There was this snow leopard that happened to be standing on a walkway that connects the two leopard cages that I got a pretty okay silhouette picture of.
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| "I'm Batman." |
Not to be outdone, this peacock (which is allowed to roam the park freely!) also did his best Batman impression by climbing on top of a roof.
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| "I am the night. Err, the dusk." |
And there was this guy, star of the bestselling novel "The Poisonwood Bible."
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| Half giraffe, half horse, half zebra, it's a Gizebrorse! Also I'm bad with fractions. |
We also saw a real Angry Bird! Look at how fat it is!
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| They had to surround it in sand because if it hits anything wooden, glass, or pig-like, it instantly explodes. |
Actually, I believe the title of "real life Angry Bird" belongs to this guy, where he's so angry that it's in his actual name.
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| Of course it's not threatened, it won't even allow poachers to step on its lawn, let alone get close enough to kill it. |
This animal quickly became one of my favorites when it let out its incredibly cry. My camera glitched when I recorded its song, so instead, have this YouTube video that I found:
Isn't it adorable? Also adorable was this plaque that we found.
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| We're not sure if Poseidon the leopard dog is an animal or the full legal name of whatever rich philanthropist donated to the zoo. |
We also found Christina's family!
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| With my estimates, her fist should come flying through my window and into my face right about n- |
Seriously though, hippos are pretty damn cool. Key club D21 definitely chose a good mascot, they're adorable.
We caught a video of one of these guys submerging...
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| Love me my underwater transition shots. |
And we noticed a neat little symbiosis happening between these fish and the hippo:
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| Much like the symbiosis between Will Smith and those whales in a particular Dreamworks animated film. |
The highlight of the day though? THE ORANGUTANS. We luckily came to their exhibit right as they were starting up their daily Cirque du Soleape show, so we got some pretty good footage:
(Ignore how obnoxious I am on camera, I don't know what the hell is wrong with me)
I especially loved this little guy:
I really regret not bringing Joby to meet his family, but on the other hand, with how active some of the other animals were, it might have been a good thing not to bring him, lest he get mauled to death by these guys:
Oh and I also had a face to face encounter with a koala!
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| "It's like looking into a mirror." -Christina (Pic via Kayla) |
We stayed at the zoo until it was pretty late. Late enough to see the golden hour...
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| It's pointing up because if koalas touch the ground to cross the street, they go straight to heaven. |
And to see when the zoo was nothing but golden light.
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| The beauty of incandescent lighting. |
We got that picture when we were on the skytram at night. And since we took it near the entrance of the park and it was near closing, we would have to walk back to the entrance from the other side of the park. At night. Pitch black night. And although it gave rise to a particularly cool picture of Kayla...
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| Looks like she's about to perform on stage but she has stage fright or something. |
It also gave us some very creepy, horror-game worthy moments. It was inevitable that we had to pass through some of the animal enclosures to get back, and even though the zoo was essentially closed at that time, the ambient jungle-esque noise that played near each enclosure kept playing. And though it might give the exhibits a bit more realism during the day, at night it only served to hide the sound of footsteps from murderers that were walking right behind us.
After sprinting the last 40 miles of the zoo when we though we heard breathing behind us, we made it to the gift shop and decided to distract ourselves from the fact that the San Diego Slayer was definitely real and definitely almost murdered us with his dirty, bear-like paws by looking at the stuff they had for sale.
They of course had cute stuffed animals...
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| Reminds me of the look I had when I was first told that girls and boys had different parts. |
Some "cute" baby children's shirts...
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| One of those things is not like the other. And no, I didn't just put the shirt there for a photo, you can see the stack of kids size snake shirts on the right. |
And a kaleidoscope, which I used to simulate what you'd see when Kayla knocks your lights out when she finally snaps and becomes the San Diego Slayer.
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| Look closely at it. |
RFotD: We never found the Dik-Dik enclosure, unfortunately :(
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