This past weekend, on July 4th, marked my one year anniversary of arriving in Japan to live and work!! You may ask, did I do anything to celebrate? And the truth is...not particularly. While it was an exciting milestone, it was also a rainy and rather cool day, which ruined my plans of going out to the beach. Instead I stayed at home did some research for work, and gave my apartment a good clean. Boring, I know.
But...on Sunday, my friend and I visited Shirotori Zoo...if you read my previous blog post, you know that we tried to do that at the end of May, but failed miserably. This time however was a success!!
We met up early in the afternoon and drove out with lots of time to spare. And the weather even cooperated with us. Rather than the rain that we've been having quite often recently, we were able to merely have a cloudy day. Yay! Oh and as a random aside...since the end of June, it has been dragonfly season! Dragonflies everywhere!! And so many of them!
Anyway...the zoo...it was rather interesting. We were able to touch many different animals (and they had buckets of fruits and vegetables that you could buy to feed them as well. We touched animals like eagles, rabbits, dogs, cats, baby geese, chicks, deer, baby goats, horses, and so on. Unfortunately no petting the tigers or lions. Disappointing. Hehehe....
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| Cute chicks...love their peeping! |
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| Sleeping lions |
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| Hehe... |
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| Cute babies! |
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| Petting the goats |
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| She really loved the deer and the feeling was mutual...she got kisses ;) |
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| These dogs are so cute!! |
I think my favorite to pet were the eagles and the dogs.
They also had animals like different types of monkeys, a raccoon (it was constantly being harrassed by one of the monkeys), pigs (both of which looked pregnant), capyberas, bats, snakes, ducks, cranes, an elephant (who was constantly swaying back and forth like it was dancing to the music playing throughout the grounds), other rodents that I don't really know the names of, alpacas, turtles and so on.
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| One of the monkeys |
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| Apparently this is a type of crane |
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| Scary face! |
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| Pretty white tiger |
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| Sleepy |
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| Grrrrooowwwl... |
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| The elephant |
It was really interesting and most of the animals were really cute, but I couldn't help but feeling a little bit bad for them. Most of them were chained up (even in their enclosures) and the enclosures were really small for the size of the animals. I also thought it was a bit strange that in the case of the tigers, they had one or more often two in each enclosure and it was just concrete...no plants and not really even any water for them as as I could see. Plus one of the deer was kind of strange...one of its eyes was all white and weepy, and some of the little rodent things were scratched up and had bloody backs...(don't worry I didn't touch them) but it was kind of strange and sad.
That being sad, I really liked some other parts. As I said...the eagles were awesome, and I love dogs, and of course tigers are awesome so...
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| The view from the zoo |
