On Saturday, we all went to the Zoo, which is right in downtown Berlin. It was opened in 1844 with a gift of animals from Frederick the ?'s animal garden and menagerie. Now there are 14,000 animals in a leafy setting. I think it is the prettiest zoo I've been to. The chickens (yes, chickens) have a half-timbered chicken house, and the giraffes live in a mosaic mosque with minarets. Some other beast has a thatched roof.
This was a black-eared marmoset. We were enjoying them running around and then realized that there was a wee baby, smaller than your thumb, on the back of one of them. We also loved the baby chimpanzee, but decided not to put that picture up, because it looked so much like a little girl in our old ward.
I love our camera! I love the hippos in Berlin! We arrived just at feeding time, but this was afterward, when the hippo was just showing off for Rob. They are a favored animal here, and they have a great big hippodome where you can watch them above and below water. They've got funny hippo names like Bulette (meat patty) and Plumps (the sound they make hitting the water).
Here the kids are sitting on the bronze statue of Knauischke (Squasher), the great hippo granddaddy of them all, literally. When the zoo was almost 100 years old, it was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin, in November 1943. Only 91 animals survived of the thousands they had, and one of them was Knautschke, who hunkered down in the water until it was over. He went on to sire nearly two dozen hippos who are in zoos all over Europe until he died in the 1980's in a Shakespearean tragedy: a fight with one of his sons.
The zoo is huge and we didn't see nearly everything, but we saw a fair piece of it. We finished off with dinner at the zoo restaurant just so we could argue about who got french fries and who had the most ketchup. We went home just as it started to rain, and carved our pumpkins from Quedlinburg.
On Saturday, we all went to the Zoo, which is right in downtown Berlin. It was opened in 1844 with a gift of animals from Frederick the ?'s animal garden and menagerie. Now there are 14,000 animals in a leafy setting. I think it is the prettiest zoo I've been to. The chickens (yes, chickens) have a half-timbered chicken house, and the giraffes live in a mosaic mosque with minarets. Some other beast has a thatched roof.
This was a black-eared marmoset. We were enjoying them running around and then realized that there was a wee baby, smaller than your thumb, on the back of one of them. We also loved the baby chimpanzee, but decided not to put that picture up, because it looked so much like a little girl in our old ward.
I love our camera! I love the hippos in Berlin! We arrived just at feeding time, but this was afterward, when the hippo was just showing off for Rob. They are a favored animal here, and they have a great big hippodome where you can watch them above and below water. They've got funny hippo names like Bulette (meat patty) and Plumps (the sound they make hitting the water).
Here the kids are sitting on the bronze statue of Knauischke (Squasher), the great hippo granddaddy of them all, literally. When the zoo was almost 100 years old, it was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin, in November 1943. Only 91 animals survived of the thousands they had, and one of them was Knautschke, who hunkered down in the water until it was over. He went on to sire nearly two dozen hippos who are in zoos all over Europe until he died in the 1980's in a Shakespearean tragedy: a fight with one of his sons.
The zoo is huge and we didn't see nearly everything, but we saw a fair piece of it. We finished off with dinner at the zoo restaurant just so we could argue about who got french fries and who had the most ketchup. We went home just as it started to rain, and carved our pumpkins from Quedlinburg.
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-tio juanito