Day 3: Tiergarten Zoo, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (ish)

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Don't get me wrong, I'm really enjoying travelling with Mom but I've come to realize that travelling with someone else tends to eliminate the really bizarre encounters I have with locals - which is part of the fun of travelling lol. People don't approach you for random convos if you're with someone else. (Case in point: Mom sat on a bench while I ran into a store for ~15min - a mime came up to her and wasn't too keen to take no for an answer lol)

ANYWAY

Mom's big thing in Berlin was that she wanted to see the zoo, so today was zoo day. Weather worked out nicely - the city has two zoos, but we were at Tiergarten which is literally inside a giant park/forest in the middle of the city, so even though it was pretty hot and humid, in the park itself it was glorious. Zoos still make me sad, but, in terms of zoos this one does seem to (mostly) have spacious enclosures and the animals weren't pacing around (except for the polar bear, poor babe).

Another thing I like about this zoo is they have signs for all the animals, but then they also had a kid version which is always a million times better. Example: for the Asian bear it has this cartoon drawing with the question"Why is the bear wearing a scarf??" and then it goes on to explain it's just a bunch of fur to help the bear look bigger and more intimidating. Or the seals lol: "They're pretty fat, aren't they?" Well they do eat the equivalent of 300 fish fingers (so the cartoon is of course eating a giant plate of fish fingers)

The highlights were the usual suspects:


• there was a baby zebra having a bad mane day
• the Asian elephants had a mud bath party
• the Asian bear was stuck in reverse and literally was walking around his entire enclosure (including down a giant hill..!) backwards
• the Sloth bear was in his element eating a giant carcass bone of some sort - he was easily the floofiest bear I've ever see in my life
• the chimpanzees were sticking their fingers up their noses and eating what they found
• the gorillas just got their afternoon snack and were chomping away on parsnips and apples while one of them sat with his hand/arm blocking photos as if to say "I'm SO over this paparazzi"
• one of the orangutang had a bucket which it of course decided to put over it's head and try to run across a log. Log/Bucket 1 - Orangutang 0
• the monkeys that had bowl-cut hairdos
• the Arctic wolves had these giant tarps they were playing tug-o-war with until they all just flopped over and started doing the doggie back dance (flat on back, four paws up)
• an ostrich fake-charged one of the antelope-like things in its enclosure... the equivalent of the step forward and say "WHAT" kind of thing
• and lastly pandas. They didn't do anything special, they're just the best. Oh and tapirs. They're weird and I love them.



Another super weird moment was the Przewalski horse... timing is everything lol. Just as I was walking by, the zookeepers arrived with 3 ponies (like, petting zoo ponies) and holy shit was that a gong show. Like they purposefully had brought the ponies there, but I'm not quite sure what the goal was - the horse lost his cool and came like charging down near the fence (but stopped before it), one of the ponies legit bolted, the other one was like spitting at it and the third one... well... he was rather excited by everything, shall we say.

And on that note, lol, that was the zoo! We went and got some pastries at Kamps (which I ALWAYS read as Kramps every time I see it in my travels) and headed off to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church which is the remnants of the tower/church that stood before WW2. It was heavily bombed/damaged during the war and they decided to leave it up as a reminder of the horrors of WW2 which is a fitting thought. We couldn't go into the new edition or the exhibitions since it was closed for some special function.

Mom also wanted to check out the Christmas store down the street, so that was fun to walk through. The German cuckoo clocks were amazingly detailed... I mean, at +1100 euro I would hope so..! I popped into a few stores (ie when Mom had her mime visit) and that was that. Tomorrow we're off to Warnemunde for the cruise - we only have 100min or something of wifi on the boat and I'm not planning on buying more, but the plan is to type things and have them ready to go so that when we're in port I can connect to a hotspot or what not and send things off.

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