Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Tyler and I, along with our friends Claire and Jesse*, went to the Morioka Zoo! While we didn't see any tigers, we did see lions and bears and all kinds of other cool stuff. It was a pretty nice zoo. Some of the pens were awesomely huge and open like this one below. Others were smaller and sadder. But I like to think that all the animals got to take turns playing in the big happy pen in the middle of the zoo. When we were there, it was full of ostriches, these little deer things, and a zebra.

The zoo was quite extensive, and had pretty much everything except tigers or pandas. There were even weird things like prairie dogs in the zoo! There was a mountain lion, and regular lions,  and some really cute playful otters, and flamingos, and raptors, and gross monkeys, and a rhino, just to name a few. 

One of my favorite parts of the zoo was this handy guide of how to identify animals from their butts. Because let's be real, it's not often that zoo animals give you the perfect view like that rhino did above.

For instance, how would I know what that creature on the right was without the handy butt guide? Oh, it's an elephant!!

And here's the butt of a cool Japanese goat thing!

All in all, it was a great day at the zoo. We had originally wanted to go to the amusement park which is right next to the zoo, but it's a holiday right now so the lines were INSANELY long, and it was hot out. So we opted for the zoo instead. Tyler and I bought yearly passes, so I'm sure we'll be going back again! And we are hoping to go to the amusement park next weekend with Claire and Jesse. I'll keep you posted!

(Here's me as one eyeball of a giraffe)

*Claire and Jesse will appear often in upcoming blog posts. Claire is in the JET program with Tyler, and they live in the apartment building next to ours. They are from New Zealand.