A...raccoon?

Today was a day of awesome. Today us kids planned on going to the zoo! All by ourselves! So proud. We packed lunches with sammiches and chips and juice and fruit and all sorts of goodies! We decided to walk to the train station because we were worried about not saying the name of the train station right for a cab driver. Even though dad said it every time we got in a cab, he was always corrected by the driver so we didn’t have a whole lot of faith in his…pronunciation. I think next time we will definitely brave the cab, cause it was like 95 degrees out…so it was like a doubily long walk.

Once we got to the train station (YAY!) we got our tokens and off we went! It takes 3 trains to get to the zoo, but luckily the zoo has its own train station at the end of its line. Crazy huh? The zoo here is like the woodland park zoo, except like 2x bigger. We were there for like 2.5 hours and only made it about half way through! Plus it wasn’t crowded at all. The animals though, are real spread out so you have some walkin to do. But it’s a beautiful zoo with the plants and whatnot. Very tropical. I also saw the smallest bird in the world! I thought it was a huge bee. It was a Bee Hummingbird, and it totally looked like a bee, but bees don’t do the things this thing was doing. But it was soooooo cute! I got pictures, but most of them are all blurs. It wouldn’t hold still for more than 2 seconds. But still. Pictures, I has. We also went through the night time exhibit. It was full of owls and rodents and even…a raccoon? We fricken hit like 400 of these a week in Washington state! And they are going to have it in a habitat and feed it and take care of it? No! Don’t! Theyre giant rats! UGH! People…we also saw their Elephants, and they were doing a very strange behavior. There were two of them, they were standing in a line, and they were swaying back and forth. I read online later that it was a thought to be part of a stress disorder in captive elephants. It was so sad. =( I wanted to play with them so they weren’t bored! Or stressed! I think our elephants are happier. Right next to the elephants, there were Leighanne’s favorite! Tigers! Two of them even! And one of them was walkin around and eventually came right up to the glass and paced for a few minutes. It was huge! But that was also sad cause pacing animals make me sad.

We also walked around the Australian exhibits which were like…3…and that was sad. Then the African exhibits. We saw giraffes real close and lots of zebras. Even some baby ones! Sooo cute. The cutest thing there was the pigmy hippo! It was adorable! It was hard to tell how big it was from afar, but maybe it was twice the size of my dog? It was cute!

After seeing that, we hit a small gift shop and then took the loooong walk back to the exit. We took the train all the way back home and took a cab. We got home and dad was already there. No one really wanted to go out tonight and do a whole lot, so we just went downstairs to a restaurant and got some food. It was like a steak house, but we all got pasta. What was weird was Sarah got white rice and, we have gotten this reaction before, the waiter thought that was really strange. They also don’t understand the term “soy sauce.” Not a lot of restaurants have soy sauce out and about. But ya know, it was alright. We ate really well for about $30, it was amazing.

After that we went outside and dad and I told the other girls that we wanted to walk to the fish store. The girls didn’t want to walk all that way because of all the walking we did today, so they went back upstairs. Dad and I had a lovely walk down town till we got to the fish store by the train station. There is where dad bought a premade fish tank complete with rocks, plants, and all sorts of stuff. I also bought myself a tank! Except mine isn’t premade and is more awesome. Hehe, so when I get home I have to have the filter running for about a month before I stick any fish in there to get everything all filtered and whatnot. Anyway, horray! That’s pretty much it.