San Diego Zoo

The San Diego Zoo is well known for its captive breeding program.
Some animals are less inhibited than others.

Evan and I had a decent breakfast on Saturday morning and arrived almost thirty minutes later than the professor's stated meeting time. Only about half the students were there yet, but amazingly enough, so was the prof. We still had another forty-five minutes to wait until our tour actually got underway.

As an educational group, we got our own, private tour guide and bus, and we got to go backstage at the camel and giraffe exhibits. That is definitely the most relaxing way to see the zoo. Anyone who has been there will know that it is very large and built on a couple of steep hills; it even has some flights of strategically placed escalators to make some of the climbs easier.


After our two hour tour, Evan and I caught a wild animal show and then went to lunch at Albert's, a nice restaurant at the top of one hill. Virtually all of their food was too highly spiced for me (I have a sensitivity that burns my lips and throat, then makes my eyelids, and eventually my whole face, swell), but I found a barbecued salmon salad I could eat. The addition of peppers and pepper sauce to virtually everything in Southern California restaurants seems to be getting out of hand. I can choke on grilled chicken with cream sauce because the chef can't make anything so bland as it should be. The chicken corn chowder, a luscious, creamy concoction, at Disneyland's Storyteller's Cafe is rendered inedible by the addition of pepper sauce. This is probably just as well, since I have the recipe, and I don't make gravy as rich as that soup.

I took over three hundred pictures at the zoo (the joys of a digital camera and huge flash media chips), but I didn't get any truly phenomenal ones. A different camera might have made the difference in some of the shots; a faster shutter speed would have helped a lot. A different photographer would have probably made the biggest difference, but there's no help for that.