Zoomania!

17Apr10

Easter break has been SO much fun.

Firstly, Jack came over for two nights last week and we went to see my uncle play at the local pub. I come from a seriously musical family – my dad and his brothers were on a Sky TV talent show in the 70s (in which they came second because the judges didn’t believe they were related), and still occasionally get together and do a few numbers at local pubs. Near the end of their set, my dad joined in and took the lead in the song I Wanna Be Like You from The Jungle Book. :’D It was EPIC, everyone in the whole place was singing along.

And on Thursday, Jack & I went to the zoo! The trip was splenderoonies – but not without some crazy hitches. First of all, after catching the bus from town at 9am, we missed our stop and ended up in the centre of Bristol. We then dashed around madly trying to find a bus that would take us to the zoo – finally, we got on one at about 10 o’clock and arrived at our destination. I haven’t been to the zoo in yonkers, and Jack’s never been at all, so we were both so excited – running and skipping about like little kids. :’D Firstly we saw the huuge lions, then the fruit bats (which were ADORABLE), and explored the aquarium and the reptile house. There was a fishy in the aquarium that was just going along sucking at the glass to get the algae off – Jack kept “kissing” it. Nemo and Dory were in there, too – as well as a really cute pufferfish. Jack & are both obsessed with lizards & snakes, so luurved the reptile house – but the best was still to come!

After some REALLY expensive tomato & basil soup at the café, we skipped off to the monkey enclosures. THERE WERE MACAQUES. And yes, we did act out the zoo scene from this hilarious music video. But the lemurs were even moar awesome! We saw King Julian and Maurice, who sure loved nibbling on carrots. Moving on, we reached the meerkat enclosure – one of my favey animals of all time. Most of the little meerkats were inside their little glass-fronted house, sat on a log – but one, probably the pack leader, was being a total poser; sitting on a post, having his photo taken by everyone. :’D The little baby ones popped out occasionally to dig holes and be generally seriously cute.

The highlight was definitely the butterly forest, though. It was in a huge, humid greenhouse-shed-type-thing – filled with gorgeous butterflies of all shapes & sizes! One really big one was sucking an orange, and there were some really lovely bright orange ones that were extremely attracted to Jack’s shoelaces. ;D The glasswings were amazing, though – they were Jack’s favourite, and one landed on his hand for a long time, which he was so excited about.

The weather was really lovely by now, and to finish off we went to see the penguins – on the way stopping off at the capybara and tapir enclosure. The penguins were supercute, as usual – there was an underwater tunnel system where you could watch them swimming over your head! On the rocks in the middle of the pool, a couple of seals were sunbathing – plus one in the water doing roly-polies & showing off to the crowd. :’D

Once we’d seen everything, we bought some Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream tubs from a vending machine and sat down for a while, enjoying the sunshine, before leaving through the gift shop. I couldn’t resist buying an adorable little penguin plushie (who is now called Pedro), and I bought Jack some hard fruit candies. c:

The next challenge was finding the bus stop to catch the bus that would take us to the mall. I had cleverly left the map at home, so with quarter of an hour to go we were speedwalking around the network of streets, asking directions from random pedestrians. With a minute to go, having no idea where we were, it was pretty obvious we were going to miss our bus – although we got some good exercise! :’D When we finally found our bus stop, we only had to wait 20 minutes for another bus – and eventually, we reached the mall at the front on the top deck of a double-decker.

I needed to look for a dress for the Summer Ball in River Island that I’d seen online – but in the store they didn’t have my size, so we did a bit of browsing. I ended up buying an awesome Beatles Yellow Submarine t-shirt and a nice purple check shirt from H&M, and some black skinnies from New Look – I can finally throw out my old broken ones! c: I also bought two DVDs on sale for £3 each in HMV – Juno and Anchorman, both totally epic films.

At seven o’clock we went to catch our bus home – but had to wait outside in the plummeting evening temperatures for over half an hour, as it was late. Getting back to Jack’s house and finally taking off my shoes was such a relief! :’D

I hope all of you had fabby Easter Breaks, too! Enjoy the piccies. c: