Lincoln Park zoo...

After eating a yummy breakfast at the Corner Bakery Cafe, we caught a bus and headed for Lincoln Park Zoo. We ended up walking quite a ways because the bus we were able to get on only went so far. We kind of forgot about it being the second day of the air show and the buses were packed solid. We walked through an old neighborhood with some really nice homes. The architecture is fabulous, we just don't have old homes like that close to our downtown. St. Paul maybe does, but not Mpls. Anyway, the zoo was very nice, but once again HOT and HUMID! Eeek!! They have quite a large ape house. They are the only animals I have a real hard time looking at for any length of time, they are just too close to humans. One of them was sitting by a wall and several people were watching him, he would look at us, then kind of put his eyes down and away, then look back, and finally he walked over to this hanging mirror in a thick frame and stood behind it. At first we thought he was looking at himself, but then we thought that he was probably telling us in his own way that he didn't want to be stared at any longer. It just feels wrong to me to stare at them. If I were a zookeeper and had direct contact with them and could converse, I think it would feel different, more like talking to a friend.
As we continued through the zoo, we noticed that a lot of the animals were either inside the buildings in their areas or in their dens, then we noticed the zookeeper signs saying that all the animals had access to their indoor areas during the air show. The wild dogs were quite interested when the planes flew over, very alert and on task. The black rhino was not pleased at all, he kept pacing around his doorway, but some zookeepers were talking to him so maybe that was calming him. The lions weren't even paying attention to all the noise, they were snoozing on the rocks.
The sky had been getting darker and darker with big clouds rolling in, and pretty soon the rain started falling. I didn't mind getting wet, but I had a cloth purse/bag that my daughter had made specifically for this trip so I could put my new camera in it and not have to carry the camera bag. I refused to keep walking the zoo until I at least had a plastic bag to put my camera in. We ran into a gift shop, along with everyone else and I was prepared to buy something largish, when right by the cash register was a basket of Lincoln Park Zoo rain ponchos. We bought 2, put them on and it stopped raining. Figures!! But, it started again, then stopped, then started, then stopped, then really started with lightening and thunder. We decided we had had enough of the zoo and the rain, so we sloshed through the puddles and waited for the bus under the shelter. When we finally got on the bus, it was once again crowded now with people going to a Beethoven concert at Millenium Park. People that were nice and clean and dry and I had to stand over them with my dripping rain poncho. Tsk, tsk.