African Lion Safari

I'm home for the weekend for the first time since I started work. All my sunflowers are dead and nobody told me!! I brought them into this world and let them die! Bad karma.

Since I'm here, I can bring back a few things I forgot last time, like my dress pants, my beard trimmer (had to go back to scissors for a month), my detachable keyboard and my computer mouse.

The Friday before last Friday I got to go to African Lion Safari. I haven't been there since I was a kid. Since I'm not allowed to take photos of participants, I never take my camera to work and it didn't occur to me that there's lots of cool photo opportunities that don't involve participants. Oh well.

I got the same sense of familiarity when I arrived there that I did at the Butterfly Conservatory. All the little details you don't bother to hold in your conscious memory, but which bubble up when reintroduced. The lake where the elephants swim was the first thing I saw, and my first thought was that the tables next to the lake were the same (or at least the same design) as when I'd been there as a child.

I appreciated all the African trivia way more now than I did as a child, for obvious reasons. They have zones in the safari set aside for specific countries. The Watuzu Cattle or however it's spelled, were cool because they were the same as the cattle I'd see every day in Mali.

They have a newborn giraffe there, the first in Canada to be born through artificial insemination. They are very proud.

They have a zone for the Americas. That kind of bothered me. This is the African Lion Safari. I don't want to think about the Americas. They had bison, deer, moose etc in that zone. I guess those are some pretty cool animals, regardless.

I also noticed all of their elephants are Asian elephants, not African. And in the Birds of Prey exhibit, they had birds from every continent.

They made the Zebra sound pretty lame. They aren't as intelligent and don't have the endurance of regular horses, and nobody knows why they have stripes.

The girl rhinos were hanging around the male rhino, which is pretty rare, because apparently their male rhino has a bad personality and the girl rhinos don't like spending time with him.

We went to the Parrot Paradise, Birds of Prey, and Elephant Walk (or something like that) shows. When I was a kid, there was a show where they asked a bunch of kids to come up and race this vulture. The claim was that it would not use it's wings and still beat us kids in a footrace. Well, I was beating it, and it used it's wings to get by me! I was so angry.

Until this recent trip, I'd wondered if I had deluded myself with childish fantasy into believing that I could beat the bird. But I got to go back to the show, and they did the same thing. When they asked who believed the vultures would when and who believed the kids would, I cheered for the kids.

And I was right! The vultures used their wings and still lost to most of the kids! And the people running the show bluffed and called a tie! I don't know why they insist on keeping this stunt going. Those vultures are terrible runners.

I also remember how at the elephant show, when mounting the elephant, the woman ripped her pants. This time around, the woman failed to full mount the elephant and dangled off it while two assistants tried to push her back on. Then she flipped over and fell off the other side, suspiciously gracefully. I'm beginning to think they usually have a put-on gimmick to make it look like something messed up.