A Rainy Day and the Zoo

Tuesday, Jan 21, it was much cooler and we had rain on and off throughout the day so we basically stayed home and vegged out.  Beth Ann and Mike gave us an Amazon Echo for Christmas and we are using it here - fun and nice music whenever we wish to have some.  There is no TV in our rental which I like.  John gets his news fix on his laptop and I watch a Netflix now and then on my laptop.  Finished watching The Irishman - about Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia - interesting.  And, I am still doing the church newsletter so got that out of the way for the week. 

We made a run to Costco since I wanted some decent meat to cook easily and simply at home.  Traffic was pretty heavy and they were doing street renovations near Costco do that was not fun.  But we got out stuff and headed back home with pork chops, ground beef and a pork tenderloin.  I divvied it all up in plastic wrap and froze everything - we're set probably until we leave - filling in with occasional eating out.  The mini kitchen here isn't much fun to cook in but it's temporary and I'm getting by.  I do not intend to use the oven - generally too hot here and it is not automatic - I hate to light gas stoves with a striker.  My cooking will be done on top.  The pork chops we had tonight were very tasty and with a big salad, it's all we needed after indulging in pizza at Costco.

Wednesday, Jan 22.  The rain is gone and the sun is out with overall cooler temps.  It is a perfect day for a walk to the zoo.  It was about a 20 minutes flat walk (all walks are flat in Merida) to the Centennial Parque where the zoo is located.  The entrance leads ito an area of playgrounds, vendor stands selling all kinds of snacks including cotton candy, tacky toys for the little ones, other types of junk food, etc.  There are picnic areas, kiddie rides and a train that goes around the perimeter of the park for 1 peso per person (about 5 cents). 

The second half of the park opens into the zoo.  It is better than some foreign zoos I've seen but nothing even remotely close to Brookfield or Lincoln Park Zoos in Chicago.  However, they had some nice looking tigers - including a couple of white ones, some decent looking lions, hippos - large and small, zebras and one lovely giraffe who was living with ostriches.  The zebras also had ostriches with them,  Strange bed fellows, I'd say.  There was a huge enclosure for capucchino monkeys that i spent a while watching as they were quite active swinging on ropes and climbing up to the top of the chain link enclosure.  Two of them were at the very top and it looked to me like they were looking for a possible way to escape - i certainly don't blame them.

Carol and I walked to the zoo a number of times when visiting Merida in the past and while the place is a bit shabby, it appears that the animals and cared for pretty well and the enclosures seem to be fairly spacious and pretty clean - better than I remember from the past.  Sure, I would rather there were no zoos but they do have their place in that most folks would never see a wild animal in person so it is somewhat educational and inspiring.  The animals seemed to be quite calm so I expect they were mostly born in a zoo.