The elephant at the Philadelphia zoo touched my hand a few years ago with his trunk and ever since, zoo has been my favorite place. I talk about my elephant experience with anyone who'll listen to me.
Luckily my boyfriend lives in Philly now, so a zoo trip was inevitable.
Boyfriend was watching the dad orangutan, who was hanging out near the entrance to the exterior habitat. The huge primate had covered himself in a sheet and looked like a short man wearing a sheet-ghost costume. Then he lumbered away, sheet flowing, to eat an orange.
Our next stop was the big cats. The lions, tigers, jaguars were all active and up and walking around. Two tigers paced incessantly coming within inches of the glass every time. I couldn't believe how huge they were.
Off-season started Nov. 1st which means lower ticket prices, no crowds and more active animals (the lions are laaaaaaaazy in the summer man). We paid the $14 entry fee and grabbed a zoo map.
We decided to go see the monkeys first, because I'm obsessed with the orangutans and because he was trying to scope out the place to see if a monkey heist was possible. I'm convinced that he only wants a helper monkey to help him assemble Fluffernutter sandwiches.
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| Daddy Orangutan was shy. |
Anyway, so he's got the map opened when I look over at him to make sure that we're on the right path to the monkey house because I'm anxious to get there.
I see him squinting at it. "I want to go like this to the map," he said, and then he dragged his fingers across the paper the way you would with an iPhone screen. "I need to zoom in here," he said, poking the paper map "and go like this."
"Do you know where we're going?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said.
So we get to the monkey house and there's a NEW BABY ORANGUTAN that was born Oct. 1 and I'm thrilled.
The baby has an old man face and these long spidery legs and arms and it's so ugly and adorable that I'm rooted to the spot and I have to watch him for half hour. He tested out his limbs by climbing on the walls, and dangling from ropes as mama orangutan hovered nearby, supervising.
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| Come closer to me! |
We watched the gorillas, and saw a massive lazy silver back resting in a hammock as a smaller, hyper female ran back and forth in the enclosure, poking him up through the latticed ropes as he laid there and tossed and turned.
At one point, the man gorilla opened his eyes and noticed me. I had my hands pressed up against the glass cupped around my eyes as I stared at him. The gorilla shot me an up and down look and I took my hands off the glass...
...Did that gorilla just check me out? I thought as I looked around to see if anyone else noticed. A guy next to me with a stroller started laughing and I said, "You saw that too?"
"That was funny," he said and we both looked back to the gorilla as he turned around and went back to sleep.
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| Boyfriend was terrified of these things. |
The rhino peed on a moss-covered rock. That was gross.
I wanted to hug the baby giraffe. I fantasized about offering him chewing gum from my pocket in an effort to lure him to reach his long neck toward me and over the fence so that I could hug him, but he was too busy licking tree bark to notice me.
We encountered these rat-sized monkeys with human-like faces. They really freaked out boyfriend, "What are they? They look sad," he said, snapping a pic with his phone. "They're so weird! They look like Gremlins."