Fun Times At The Zoo!!

Even though i saw the bronze status of Ah Meng at the zoo's entrance, I didn't even know Ah Meng had passed away the day before when we visited the zoo last Saturday. It was only after i got home and read the papers that i found out the news. Not that i have had much to do with her but she was indeed an icon of the Singapore zoo and i can imagine how painful it is for the keepers who had looked after her in her living years. Farewell Ah Meng.

Anyway, i think my long CNY break was pretty well-spent! Besides the usual visiting and pigging out, the husband and I caught 2 shows - Kungfu Dunk and Ah Long Pte Ltd. Both were mindless but entertaining regardless. Even though we're both Stephen Chow fans and watched possibly all (or 99%) of his movies, we decided to give CJ7 a miss because of the seemingly boring trailers and the bad feedback from friends.

Because we didn't get our prata fix on Friday night, we headed down to Jalan Kayu on Saturday morning for our prata and briyani. It's been awhile since we've been to Jalan Kayu because we discovered Bukit Timah and Prata Cafe subsequently. If my memory still serves me well, i think the last time we were there was probably 7-8 years ago when we were still kids! As usual, we did our food assessment thingie and decided that the best briyani award still goes to Al Azhar at Bukit Timah. Love it but somehow the husband always needs the toilet after eating that! Dad (who loves prata, briyani, indian rojak and such) also suffered the same fate when i brought him there too! Still, tummyaches never stop us from any food! Okay, maybe except for Kenny Rogers and XXL chicken (the horror!!!!) but that's another story.

We've always been pretty spontaneous people (reckless at times, i don't deny) so while we were travelling down the expressway on that same Saturday, Dan suddenly asked if i wanted to go to the zoo because it's been years since we've been there. During our schooling days, we were always doing crazy tourissy stuff like visiting the zoo, bird park, science centre, sentosa, reptile park etc. and it's been awhile since we've revisited any of those places (sentosa with the dog not counted cos we're only at the beach). I gave him the affirmative answer of course and we headed straight home to grab the camera and off we were to the zoo!

Spent close to 4 hours at the zoo and one of the first animals we saw was the capybara (main attraction cos it's the rat year) - LARGEST rodent in the world ok!

The white tiger was awesome! Such big big paws! We spent quite abit of time pacing up and down the boundaries of the tiger enclosure trying to get the best shot of it but our attempts were largely unsuccessful due to technical limitations.

He looked just like a big cat (okay, i know he IS actually a big cat) and was just lazing in the sun licking his paws and cleaning his face. The other white tiger was abit strangy and exhibited stereotypical behaviour, pacing up and down a kazillion times (sorta like us when we were trying to get a good picture! hahaha!), which was not uncommon for zoo animals (and pets). Dan asked me what the arguments for and against zoos were and we discussed that for abit. Can't totally decide if the zoo is a bad or good place but i guess if efforts are put in to conserve our fauna and educate people (especially our next generation), it probably isn't such a bad thing after all.

Our all-time favourite - the meerkats! One of them was obviously posing for the camera - vain little creatures! The last time we visited the zoo, we remembered all of them to be fat, pudgy and pot-bellied! Now, they all look svelte and nimble.

Pygmy hippos - "underwater ballerina of West Africa"? Hmmmm.....i'm reaaaally not quite sure.


SSSSSssssssssSSSSSSsssssssssss.


Another of our favourite (again)! We both remembered the cheetah facts and were rattling off what we had read as we headed towards the zoo exit. FYI, a cheetah can go up to a max speed of 112km/hr but can only maintain at top speed for at most 300-400m in case it overheats. Sorta like Scooby and other performance cars, the husband didn't forget to add....haha!

At the end of the day, we were deadbeat and brought the day to a perfect close with more bingeing! It is almost mandatory to have KFC everytime we go for a tourissy outing so we did just that and man, it was definitely finger lickin' good! The husband remarked that we should do such stuff more often like we used to, just to break out of our normal routine and i can't agree more.

With the baby on the way, we're pretty reassured of the fact that we'll become "Friends of the Zoo" in no time, just like all our other friends who've been promoted to parents. Wanted to get a little something for the baby (since this is technically his first visit to the zoo) but we couldn't decide what to get! The husband wanted to get a green t-shirt bearing a picture of a super fierce-looking sssssssnake for his little prince but they only had it in toddler sizes and didn't have it in infant size. Besides, since our little one is born in the year of the rat, the big, scary snake might scare the living daylights out of him too....hahaha! In the end, the husband decided that when the baby is old enough, we'd bring him here and he'll get to choose anything he wants! ANYTHING!!!!

Baby, i hope you heard that! :)