Zoo-faux-pia

I logged over 200 travel days in 2016, most of them in a hotel sandwiched uglily between two 12+ hour days and another overworked guy, since we were required to travel with two guys in inexpensive rooms - in US culture, this is totally common and acceptable for high school students and prisoners. Saving the company trivial amounts of money was such a high priority that I innovated a much better way to totally eliminate my employee travel costs. Live and learn.

And so the threshold for re-blogging was rather high. No new posts in over a year, despite plenty of 2017 travel and other fun stuff in my ongoing quest to un-burn-out. Is chilling out the opposite of burning out? It sounds better than burning in, at least. 

The zoo is artistically and zoologically unique. Most zoos have pens or cages or other areas devoted to specific animals. And not other, more common animals. But the locals are too cool for that. Why not just let the animals roam around? Who cares about signs? For example, here we are at the capybara pen.

I am not a zoologist. I didn't conduct DNA testing. Frankly, I didn't even ask anyone. But I believe that one of the two animals in this capybara pen is more capybaresque than the other. (Expert's tip: it's the one that doesn't look like a peacock.) What a cool peacock! He just cruises around the zoo, unafraid of animals or (worse) humans from around the world, unafraid even of blogmockery. Wow. 

I didn't get a picture of the housecat in the tiger exhibit. Housecats are fast. You'll just have to believe it was funny. 

Here's one of a California sea lion. These are quite common in La Jolla, where they've been fighting against children for the hearts and minds of the locals for decades, and often winning. No, really. Look it up. 

It didn't matter anyway, as little Ali was mainly interested in horses or any animals from Zootopia. 

Finally, we noticed that the local park designers seem to have a thing with dragons. The lower picture (which I didn't take) even explicitly mentions three dragons. Perhaps they helped in the conquest over the Moors, Arabs, or Lannisters. I don't know.

But I can explain the horses. These mythical horses created the Catalan language by stomping the vowels off the ends of all Spanish words. They also trample foreigners who make fun of their language. I would be scared, but I can always run to the zoo and safely hide in the lion pen.