Day 24 - Calgary Zoo

I expect todays blog entry will be a short one. If I wanted to sum it up in one line I'd write 'Went to the Zoo', but that would slightly defeat the point of having a blog I suppose.

Although you can get the C-Train to the zoo we banked on Calgary being as quiet as the previous day and drove instead. Our hunch was right as the roads were almost empty and it wasn't long until we were parked up and heading in to see the animals.

The first section was a dinosaur area. The observant among you will have noticed that dinosaurs are extinct. Clearly the designers of the zoo knew this (at least I hope they did) so instead they've built some dinosaurs out of plaster. It wasn't very convincing or exciting, although it wasn't a complete waste of time as I discovered a new fact - until 120 million years ago there were no flowering plant species on earth, so most dinosaur species would never have seen a flower, how sad for them.

With that out of the way we moved on to real animals. There were too many to remember, let alone try to list, but some of the highlights were the gorillas, elephants and giraffes. One of the giraffes was licking the rear-end of another and even drank some of the other giraffes wee - I'm not sure if that counts as a 'highlight' of the day but it's definitely a sight I won't quickly forget. From the look on the giraffes face he quickly realised his mistake and he won't be forgetting it either.

And that concludes my zoo summary. Fun wasn't it?

On the way back we mistimed our arrival at Ros's, arriving home just as she and my mum had gone out, so we popped to the nearby shops and got a Starbucks. The Starbucks was part of a large bookstore and was right next to the magazines so I had a quick look at the video games magazines. To my surprise nearly all of them were British imports at marked up prices - quite why they don't import US magazines instead is a mystery to me, perhaps Canada just like to distance themselves from America where possible.

Eventually we managed to rendevous successfully back at Ros's for a third consecutive home cooked meal; quite a welcome break after the barrage of restaurants we've been subjected to previously. We spent the evening sat on the balcony waiting for the Canada Day fireworks which didn't start until almost 11pm (having fireworks that for north in the middle of summer there's isn't really much choice) and in the event were too far away to see clearly anyway. Oh well, it's not like we've never seen fireworks before.