Minnesota Zoo

So before we left for South Dakota, we spent a day at the Minnesota Zoo with one of our favorite families. They have a little daughter, about two and a half, who loves the zoo, and so we were invited to tag along and enjoy it with her.

Now, generally people in Minnesota are very nice and friendly, and it turns out that the animals of Minnesota are friendly too. I was amazed at how many of the animals in the zoo came directly up to the glass and actually seemed interested in interacting with the humans. So many zoo animals seem to just laze around all day, but that wasn't true here. This leapord got right up in our faces.

Cool, huh? And in addition to the usual animals (bears, fish, otters, giraffes) they had some exotic ones before. This is a Takin, from China. I had never even heard of a Takin before, but it's the national animal of Bhutan. Yeah, I bet none of my readers knew that.

It was a strange looking creature.

Of course a zoo cannot be an excellent zoo without my favorite animal, and this zoo came through in style in the squirrel department. They had a GIANT colony of prairie dogs! My most loyal readers will recall that we saw prairie dogs at a zoo earlier in the summer, and it was the high point of that week. These prairie dogs were pretty great too, especially one who kept coming up to the glass and looking at me.

Isn't he cute? I think he was hoping that I would help him escape his little prairie dog enclosure. Oh how I wish I could have taken him home!

The Minnesota Zoo is really quite nicely done; they even keep the manholes in the zoo theme. Check out this cool shell manhole.

Okay, well, you guys might think it's weird for me to post this, but my mother works for public works and I know she'll think it's interesting.

Near the end of the day, our little two and a half year old friend got kind of bored with the animals and wanted to play with her princesses instead. She demanded that her mother make the princesses "nakey" and then proceeded to put them in the "bathtub" together.

Check out how Jasmine is touching Cinderella inappropriately! Later Jasmine and Snow White had a little kissing session, which I pretty much had seen coming since they jumped in the hot tub together. I've watched enough Real World on MTV to know how this goes!