-written by Krista Cukrowski
This Saturday, I went to the zoo with Dad and Katie. Dad had warned me that it most likely would be very depressing, filled with mistreated animals and such, and that I would most likely hate it. However, I really liked it. In general, it was…nice compared to what we were expecting. It turned out to be something like the Abilene Fair meets an Exotic Ranch. As Zoological Parks go, they had a very large range of animals, almost everything from rhinos to small goats (which I still don't understand the point of…you're not even allowed to pet them. Lame.).
One thing that Ken was really impressed with was that they had 3 different types of large flightless birds (Ostrich, Rea, and Emu), and they even had a penguin. (Yes, just one, and it looked like it was a bit confused as to why it was there). Ken says it was "Bizarre." Some of the more interesting things we saw were: Baby Leopards and a very playful older one, a Hippo, Coatis, Seals, Ocelots, Snakes, Guanacos, Baboons, Tigers, Parrots and Macaws, a gross capybara, tons of domestic cats that just run around freely, and some semi-attractive hyenas who were interested in catching some of those domestic cats that run around freely.
On a sadder note, our visit there was blighted by the presence of what I would have to say is the most repulsive thing I've seen so far in Montevideo. It consisted of a very obese child of about nine or ten who was continuously ramming his wide body into the fences to scare the animals. For example, the first time we encountered this disturbed child was when this really cute, fluffy sheep went up to the edge of the enclosure to get a cracker. How adorable, right? Instead of the cracker, it got whacked in the face by the moronic fat boy who was being cruel to animals. Grrrr….I really didn't like this kid, and if I knew how to tell him not to do that in Spanish, I would have, but alas….stupid language barrier.
The Abilene Zoo is definitely a much happier place than MVD's Zoo, but when you consider that admission was only 20 pesos (inexplicably, we got in for free, which we attribute to Carnaval, our fallback explanation), and the size of it, they really are doing the best that can!
Oh, and did I mention that we got cotton candy? It was good.
