After a mostly great day at the zoo and aquarium (amazing dolphin show! private tour of lemurs inside the enclosure because we don't speak spanish! parrot feeding! huge sharks! even some new animals we've never seen before!), poor Nate took a header on the sidewalk as he was racing his brother to the metro. Now he has a big old goose egg. He's a-ok but future photos will show a pretty serious shiner on his forehead.
We had mixed feelings about the Madrid zoo itself. It was clean, we saw a lot of different animals up close, and most of the animals had big enough fixtures. The fences seemed surprisingly low/weak, though perhaps that's our perception due to the SF Zoo tiger-mauling. The biggest bummer of the day--and this may be a kind of cultural difference (Ed thought maybe some sort of family tradition even)--was the public's endless feeding of the animals despite huge signs extolling them not to. And with no staff reinforcing those rules, grizzly bears sat begging for popcorn and nuts about 10 feet away from 30 families. People poked and petted anteaters over fences despite signs that warned them they were aggressive and dangerous. And we saw a boy pelting a deer repeatedly with stones while his family looked on. All that said, we had the most amazing interaction with a very empassioned and kind staffmember who gave us the up-close educational tour of the endangered lemurs. (Pictures of a lemur trying to pull Ben's pants down to get to some peanuts in his pocket tk. Ben didn't give him any.) So it was one of those kinds of days. Bad behavior happens everywhere. We reminded the (shocked) boys that the tigers at the SF zoo were being harassed too...
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