When I woke up Friday morning in Chicago, I felt like I hadn't slept at all. I blame this on my snoring roommate. Despite this, I was excited for a day of fun with my Gonzaga guys. We started off at the Rosemont el station for the sole purpose of picking up Duncan Donuts. To folks in the midwestern and eastern United States, they aren't such a big deal, but to smalltowners from the Pacific Northwest, the orange and pink signs are a rarity to be cherished. We got a dozen donuts between us (I had only one, but I also had some delicious hashbrowns!). Soon, we were on a bus to the Lincoln Park Zoo. It seems like an odd destination of all places to go in Chicago, but we'd heard it was fun and free, and we weren't disappointed.
It had been five years since I'd been to the zoo and I thoroughly relished the opportunity to go again. It was filled with elementary school children, whose enthusiasm made it all the more fun. While visiting the kangaroos there was a street performer* (Zoo walkway performer?) playing "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport". I always hated that song, but in that setting it worked. We saw alpacas, zebras and chimpanzees, too. We also saw the giraffe pictured above, who was inexplicably sharing its zone with an ostrich... If there's a symbiotic relationship there I'm not aware of it...
We had a quick bite of lunch at the snack bar. Nathan and Paul had Chicago style hot dogs... I had a regular, boring hot dog, but it was good, and we supported the animal aid efforts of the zoo, I'm sure. We also got our picture taken in a photo booth. I got the picture above when we were going through the "African Safari" section. It's one of many adorable Meerkat photos our group captured. Not surprisingly, they were some of the most fun animals to watch... probably because they were awake. I saw sleeping lions, sleeping tigers, sleeping leopards, not to mention some adorable sleeping gorillas. (See below)
This was the most profound moment we saw. We just stood there watching this momma and baby gorilla sleep. It was precious. The rest of the monkeys were much less profound, but incredibly entertaining. I didn't have good pictures of them to show because they hardly stopped moving! I was most impressed by a gibbon that had lost part of its forearm, yet still managed to make acrobatic leaps through his faux habitat with the rest of the gang. Wow. 
On our way back past the lions, we were delighted to see that he woke up! We got to see him yawn, walk about 20 paces, then lay down again in a different spot. Not all that exciting, but more than we'd gotten to see of him all day, and it made for a great photo op. We managed to swing by the seal tent, also, before leaving, and upon hearing this I started clapping. Just like a seal. This unconscious reflex was both frightening and hilarious. Kind of like my fellow seal clapper Paula Abdul. All too soon we were on the bus back to the hotel and checked in. Funny enough, the guy checking us in was Paul, Paolo, and Nathan's fourth roommate, Frank. This was especially funny because they had jokingly said they were going to Gaslight him (ie: pretend he didn't exist to drive him crazy)... But that's pretty much impossible when he's the guy giving you your lunch money. He ended up being my roommate too, in that he was reading questions in the room I was scorekeeping in. The four of us would mostly scorekeep on Saturday, so the scrimmage rounds Friday night were a good opportunity to moderate.
What we didn't count on was just how long we'd be scrimmaging. It was 10:00 before we reached the gleaming mecca of IHOP and got some dinner (or breakfast). It was delicious. Below is a polar bear who thought Nathan looked delicious.
No comments:
Post a Comment