Zoo
by Tommy
Yesterday, I took the choo choo train up to Dublin to meet up with someone lovely to go to the zoo. The weather, last time I checked the weather it was warning of a chance of rain. As it turned out, I felt one drop – an actual drop only – walking into the Phoenix Park – other than that it varied between cloudy but warm and sun. No really, sun! Yeah! I know! That big yellow yoke in the sky that warms stuff. Personally I was shocked. Pleasantly surprised, but shocked.
I’ll admit we got lost en route there, but it wasn’t really lost. We had a map, which you can see below, so we weren’t completely lost. Somewhat lost, you could say. Even if you’ve got the latest Iphone 4 or GPS system for your car, you’re only human and if you’re lost, you’re lost!
Above was our map. Screenshotted from maps.google.com, I told it to start from Hueston but I let it decide where I was going, by wherever it thought “Dublin Zoo” was.
As it turns out, we took a different route – we didn’t take the second right that it told us, instead entering the Park via Chesterfield Avenue. At which point, Aoife recognized her surroundings and we made it to the front gates of the zoo.
For some reason, I thought that tiger was dead for a while, until his chest moving up and down rhythmically was pointed out to me, and then he did that weird thing cats do when asleep, and waved his paw round.
The sea lions were next. There were footballs in the pool with them but they didn’t use them, fail seals. It was here that there were a ton of really high powered 1,000 megapixel cameras taking a thousand snaps a minute with lenses longer than your arm. Needless to say, my 1.3 megapixel iPhone and I felt quite emasculated. Poor thing.
It was weird. On Friday night I wrote a post, the film review of Bolt, which featured the hamster called Rhino, and set it to publish on Saturday (yesterday) at 13:00. Little did I realize then that at almost that exact time, I’d be seeing real rhinos!
In the same area were the zebras, who mooned me. Cheeky buggers. Here, for some reason which redoubtably made sense at the time, but escapes me now, I began to wonder what’d happen if I lost my balance, and my iPhone fell down into the enclosure. Admittedly, it’d take a rather flamboyant fall on my part to get over the railing and over the rocks, but I’m sure I’d manage it if I tried my best and wished real hard.
The giraffes wandered aimlessly around their enclosure, which we were above, just meandering about the place looking pretty. There are those rocks again!
The caption for this hippo fails. I’m sorry. I called the image ‘hungry hungry hippo’ on Flickr, but that’s just jumping on a bandwagon, and doesn’t relate hugely to the actual image I took. However, I looked up a thesaurus and no image matched with ‘lying down’ or ‘lethargic’. My bad.
The unknown animal of elephantine proportions.
Almost anything? That sounds like a challenge!
Interestingly, the Irish translation differs slightly. Probably to be expected because, like, it’s a different language, but interesting nonetheless. The English says ‘they’ll eat almost anything’, the Irish says ‘there’s almost nothing they won’t eat’.
Hang on, I think I’m wrong.
Is beag rud nach n-íosfaidh….
That actually might be ‘it’s a small amount of things that they won’t eat’
I’m not sure. Any Irish speakers wanna help?
+++++
So, those are the photos shown here aren’t the only ones I took, not by a long shot. I took about 90, showing 8 here. The rest are holed up in my iPhoto.
Overall, a rather fantastic day :-)
P.S: A special mention totally has to go to my iPhone battery. I listened to music and read Twitter constantly on the train up to Dublin, took the 90 photos, and listened to music about half the journey down, leaving it on standby for the remainder, save for texting people and reading Twitter :-P
At Limerick Junction I texted Mom to ask her to bring an iPhone charger, afraid it’d die. It lasted all the way to the carpark. What a good little phone :)