THE TIME I SAW A POLAR BEAR...

You may have noticed that my zoo update didn't contain anything about polar bears. That's because we took so many pictures of the whole day, including the polar bear that it would have been too long. So instead you get one whole post about it!

First off its probably fair to say that I was far too excited about the whole thing.  I tried to play it cool but really I was as excited as some of the screaming children who were there. When you arrived there was a cute little display that had giant story books telling you the story of two of the polar bears. They were rescued as cubs and brought to the zoo so there was an amazing sculpture of the two of them. Now don't be deceived I was not as calm as I appear in this photo!

Once we'd walked round the corner the pure excitement could not be contained. He was there! A real life polar bear and he was amazing! 

He was so hilarious. We sat there for ages just watching him sleep and stretch out. He went forging for carrots and started munching on them. I was just loving it. He seemed so adorable and to be honest would fit in so well with Macintosh as they are both as lazy as each other! So of course if I ever find an orphaned cub its coming home with me!

After being there for a while just endlessly watching Andrew did convince me to see some other animals and then return. I reluctantly agreed but upon me return he was swimming!!

He just casually walked into the water, stretched himself out and then set about trying to scratch an itch using the rocks underwater. It was so funny. Hard to photograph due to the glass, which was more than a little smeared due to small children. Yuck! But you could see him so clearly. 

He then decided to swim straight past me!

Andrew managed to snap a picture of me once he'd finished swimming past me. I look semi normal as a result. Whilst he was swimming past Andrew said my face looked hilarious as I was literally like a child on Christmas morning!

Mr Polar Bear then decided to just casually sit in the water for a bit so he was cooled off before he waded straight out in search of more food. Amazingly he didn't shake himself off when he got out of the water. I don't know why but I always imagined he was shake like a dog. Apparently not, its best just to let everything drip off you. 

So there we go, me and the polar bear. I'm already looking at ways to see one in the wild. Antartica anyone?! 

H

SAN DIEGO ZOO

Ok, so I have become truly awful at updating you on things that have been happening. We have done some things and they've taken an age to get blogged about. Those of you who have a form of social media will see snippets of what we've done, but those of you who rely on this will have no idea. I want to blame the summer for this, things all get out of balance and you relax more, but as I'm not officially working I can't blame the summer. Its just me! So finally I have a post about our trip to the zoo.

It was raved about by my uncle before we came to live in California so when we finally went down to San Diego without the dog we knew it was going to be something we'd do. I can tell you now it was an amazing experience. The zoo is so lovely, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

There was an amazing skyfari, an aerial tram, that took us from one end of the zoo to the other. Obviously we had a few rides...

We saw a whole host of different animals. It was completely amazing. Here's just a few of them.

Otters are Andrew's favourite animal so we spent quite a bit of time watching them. Unfortunately we didn't get many good pictures of them because we were too fascinated. This otter was playing with a rock underwater and was darting around all over the place. He was so much fun to watch. Andrew was laughing away. 

We also got the chance to get quite close to the tigers. One of them was busy showing off for the others so he was playing about with this giant bowl in his area. Every time he got close to the glass people would gasp. I just thought he was beautiful. 

Then the final cool thing we saw was part of their animal outreach programme. They like to take animals into schools and into the community to raise awareness. Obviously there is a limited amount of safe animals they can take but they have been developing a way to take cheetahs and other cat like animals (not lions or tigers) out into the community. Its through dogs. They pair up their zoo animal with a domestic dog and once they are really friendly the zoo animal will take its cues from the dog. When the dog is calm then so is the zoo animal. If it gets angry then so does the zoo animal. 

Whilst we were there they had to move the cheetah so that they could do and do one of these talks. So we watched them bring the dog into the enclosure, they put both on them on leads and then the cheetah simply followed the dog around. It was crazy. The lady was walking the cheetah as if it was the most normal thing in the world!

We loved San Diego Zoo, so put it on your list of places to visit. My uncle was right! 

H