Tiergarten

So the travel weekend, which I had long intended to spend in Prague sounded expensive and a little crowded, so we stayed in town and went to the world’s oldest zoo instead. This was definitely also the coolest zoo in the world, hands down. Within the first quarter of an hour, we watched a butterfly hatch and discovered a new kind of amphibian. The zoo has the beautiful architecture of Schönbrunn (they’re on the same grounds), only it has wild animals instead of overpriced cake.

The zoo had all of the regular trappings, all of the things you’d expect at a zoo.

And a few of things that you wouldn’t (looking at my pictures, I’d say it was mostly stuff you wouldn’t...)

Since this zoo is so old they had some of the old cages that they used when it was originally built as the emperor’s personal corner of the animal kingdom (a la our dear MJ). Their children’s area looked like the set in the second half of the time machine when he’s in the year 20,000something. It looked so fun and so forbidden. There was no one over 3 feet tall on it and I’m pretty sure no one bigger would fit.

There was a hike inside the zoo, which was both beautiful and a good little workout. At the top, there was a beautiful view of the whole city which you could take in from a canopy walk in the trees. Then we went down to see the panthers feed which we maybe should have skipped. I just wanted to see them up close, but I forgot what they eat. How do you tell an enormous spotted cat that he’s got a little bloody rabbit fur on his mouth?

Speaking of eating, we tried ‘Langos’ as our over-priced zoo food purchase of the day. It looked like a funnel cake and a Navajo taco had a love child. Turned out to be a giant disk of salty fried thing. Sounds gross, wasn’t bad. We asked a little girl to take a picture and she said she had to go wash her hands first, we watched her walk into the boys bathroom to clean up and found out she was a he….whoops.

The guy in the background of this picture looks like an aged Captain van Trapp. I couldn’t resist stalkerly picture snapping. There are lots of old man that hang around this park that look like they just stepped off a film set. The Schönbrunn grounds are a beautiful place to just be, I hope I can spend a little more time here before I go away.