San Diego Zoo

Jean and I visited the San Diego Zoo today. Jean is a member so she got me a guest pass. We started out our visit by taking the guided bus tour of the whole park so I could pick out the places I wanted to focus on.

The star of the bus tour was the 2 month old giraffe, who was extraordinarily cute. The first place was the panda exhibit. We walked thru the fern display, across a bridge, and into the panda garden. There was a zoo keeper there talking about the pandas. She spends a lot of time with the pandas and had some really interesting information. The female belongs to the zoo, and she had a male child at the time I visited.

Apparently panda's have a limited amount of maternal instincts and when they are done, they are done. Period. And this panda was done. So, they had to move the 19-month old panda to its own enclosure. Jean told me that the agreement the Zoo has with China requires them to return the baby panda to China when he is 24 months old. They are such cute animals, but the zoo keeper warned us not to let them fool us. Pandas can be quite dangerous. But the two we saw today were really cute! BTW, this picture is photo shopped; they would not let us handle the pandas.

We had lunch near the Asian cats - Mandarin chicken salad and pot stickers. Both excellently prepared, and huge.

We walked to the Asian waterfowl exhibit. The Asian birds were gorgeous, but the most interesting thing about the exhibit was that local ducks and egrets had discovered the enclosure and decided that zoo keepers feeding them several times a day is a good thing and had moved in. The exhibit did have some beautiful black and white Asian ducks and some grey Asian egrets. So, their American cousins probably felt right at home.

We took the Kangaroo express bus up to the elephant odyssey exhibit. It looks like that space had recently been remodeled and expanded. They have about 6 elephants there, half of them Asian which you can tell because they have smaller ears and bigger heads, and half of them African because they have larger ears and smaller heads. Jean and I were captivated by Minda, who the sign on the display said had lived 35 years of her life alone, and seems to prefer to be by herself in the enclosure. The day we were there, she was indeed by herself. Since elephants are primarily herd animals, it was sad to think about what her story might have been. The zoo keepers had come up with a new game for the elephants. They had created large cubes with holes in them. The cubes were stuffed with food, and then hung on chains from a large structure that looked like a giant umbrella stand. The elephants had to try to get the food out of the cube while it swung back and forth on the stand. They did seem to enjoy the game. We also saw a maneless wolf - which is not actually a wolf, and a California condor, which is really huge close up.

We got back on the Kangaroo express to ride back to the entrance, but then changed our minds as we approached our destination and decided to go on the Skyfari ride, an aerial tram that transverses the park. We could see a long distance from that height - the San Diego bay, and Balboa Park which is right next to the Zoo. We decided to take a twirl thru Balboa Park. But first I had to visit the Kid Store and buy stuff for my grandchildren.

Balboa Park was built for two expositions: the Panama Exposition in 1915 and the California Pacific Exposition in 1935. All the buildings remain and San Diego has discovered cultural and history uses for the

structures. We walked in along El Prado street with buildings that out-Rococo'ed Rococo style. The exteriors are so dense with sculptural features, they can only be described as Byzantine. We walked thru the Plaza de Panama where we could see the San Diego Museum of Man which looked like a cross between a Spanish church and a Moroccan mosque, but was actually built for the Exposition. We continued on to Spreckels Organ Pavilion which looks like a Roman amphitheatre with St. Peter's Cathedral portico wings that serve as a kind of breezeway. There really are organ concerts in the park. And this guy doing a human statue in the park - with an occasional mime guitar concert.

We walked to the Houses of Pacific Relations. It is a circle of small cottages representing 36 nations exhibiting their history and culture. There were Norwegian, Swedish, Irish, Iranian, Chinese, etc cottages. They take turns putting on programs on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I bought some post cards. We twirled around the Museums and puppet theater int he Pan American Plaza. The sheer number of museums is overwhelming - sort of like the Smithsonian in D.C.

Then we backtracked to the Prado House of Hospitality with its gorgeous interior courtyard to the Botanical Building (photo above). We went inside to see the orchids and palms on display. There were orchids of every color, size, and description on display; more orchids than I have ever seen in one place. On the way out we walked thru the portico of the extremely rococo Casa de Prado.

Jean and I walked a lot today.