Going to the Zoo!!

My friend Erin is in town from San Diego and after a long week of classes and conferences I stayed home this afternoon and we explored the city a bit. We figured that since it was a cold and snowy day it would be a perfect day to go to the zoo. The Lincoln Park Zoo is a very nice zoo (and this is coming from someone who grew up with the San Diego Zoo) and it's FREE! We pretty much had the entire place to ourself and actually had a great time.



Here is a little tour of our day.

We started with a walk through the African Savana. I don't think that they usually get several inches of snow there....



Thankfully, the animals have indoor homes with central heat.

There were a bunch of these little guys running around. They seemed to really enjoy posing for the photo shoot.


These guys were in the middle of lunch but were nice enough to pose for a profile shot anyway.

We then visited the Polar Bear. He was the only animal that actually looked happy to be outside. In fact, I think we were interrupting his nap.



After our attempts at trying to convince the polar bear that he wanted to do some flips for us failed, we turned to go on our merry way. Hey! Look what we found! Not something you see every day in Chicago.

At this point we were ready to be out of the snow for a bit so we wandered into the Big Cat House.

That Big dude there looks a little annoyed because there was some obnoxious lady there who kept calling out to him and making funny noises at him. We're pretty sure she was some crazy, rich lady (probably the one the cat house is named after). The people with her seemed to be thinking 'man, she's crazy. But, she has a lot of money so I guess we have to humor her...'


Here are the lions trying to ignore the crazy lady. Right after this picture was taken, the big dude started talking to the leopard across the way. They were probably figuring out which one was going to bite her head off. I will say, it was a little unnerving to be standing in the middle of the place with very large cats surrounding you making a lot of noise (which echoes when you are inside) and then you suddenly realize that the 'bars' on their cages look more like violin strings that really could snap at any moment.


This little mama was just trying to get her beauty rest.


We exited the cat house and I turned to Erin and said "Wouldn't it be funny if they had pink flamingos standing outside in the snow?" Guess what we found when we turned the corner?



These guys looked really cold standing out there!

Our last stop was at the monkey house where one little guy kept us entertained for at least a half an hour. I took some video of him swinging around and coming right up to the window but it's not wanting to load right now. So, I'll have to work on getting that posted at a later time.

He must have really liked us because every time we got near the glass he would swing down and do a little dance right in front of us. He didn't like anyone else though. As soon as other people would come by, he would go back and sit in his tree and wouldn't come down until they had left. Either that, or he didn't like the color red. I had on a red hat and Erin had on red gloves. Either way, he was one funny little dude!

After our adventures at the zoo we headed downtown for a bit of shopping and some Giordano's pizza.