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Published: January 10th 2007
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Go to the zoo: fondle monkeys!
Well, at least the monkey seemed to like it. We decided to take it easy on this Christmas day, you know, nice relaxing stroll around the botanical gardens, or something. Turns out the gardens are where the zoo is, and despite warnings from guidebooks to avoid the zoo we thought we’d check it out. Much better than expected, most of the animals had reasonable enclosures, and overall it was better than most of the zoos I’ve been to in Japan for example. Little did we suspect the horrors that were to come…
We were more interested in Vietnamese animals, but its always interesting to check out the big cats, you know, lions, tigers, jaguars and so on. Passing the tiger cage we noticed that feeding was at 2pm. Jolly good, we’ll check it out after the next cage which happens to be the lions. There was a crowd around the lions cage and a truck outside with a couple of guys. Sohyun being Sohyun wants her photo taken against the back of the truck which holds the lion food. She notices in the back of the truck buckets of meat and a small cage of rabbits. Ha ha this must be the food we joke. Ha ha ha.
Strange shapes at the zoo
No, I don't know what was going on, maybe a festival or something? We hear a squealing sound and find out that it is no joke: live rabbits are fed to the lions. Shocked and disbelieving, we press forward through the crowd to see carnage in the cage. Two rabbits each is the diet for each big cat, and as there were two lionesses in one cage, there were four rabbit corpses to be. Already a couple of them had been slaughtered, their entrails spilled over the concrete floor. One had been injured by the lioness, and she was playing with it, padding it around as it pitifully squealed and tried to hobble away. The other one was loose for a bit longer until the lion decided to end its time of freedom. The crowd around the cage included families, but nobody seemed particularly upset or distressed at these gruesome sights.
We felt compelled to witness the events unfold at the tiger cages and we rushed over. It was much quieter there. By the time we arrived, the rabbits were in the cages, flopping around, but more or less ignored by the tigers. The big Sumatran male continued to pace around the outside while Flopsy and Mopsy seemed to hit
Bears in the woods
Sohyun tries to get close to the bears. They had a pretty nice enclosure. it off with each other, playing tag or some other rabbit game . Flopsy even ran out at the tiger and chased him a bit, but failed to attract any attention. The other two tigers were relaxing towards the back of the cages, nonchalantly observing the rabbits hop around. However, when we came around from the other side of the cages we saw that in the short space of time one of the tigers had taken action and killed one of the rabbits and was hunting down the other. No playing with dinner here. It efficiently cornered the rabbit against the side of the cage, one large paw came down resulted in one dead rabbit. Unlike the lions, this was a no-nonsense killing by an animal that has decided it was time for a snack.
When we walked around other parts of the zoo we found they fed live rabbits to other animals as well. Near closing time we found ourselves in the reptile section, and, shivering on the ground in the python cell was a rabbit. It didn't move, only its shaking told us it was still alive as the snake slithered up to it... and around
Swinging
They had a nice little island to themselves as well. it, ignoring it. Then the zookeeper told us to move along because the place was closing down.
It wasn’t all revulsion at the zoo. We got invited for a couple of drinks with a group of friendly businessmen in the zoo restaurant (we didn't check if rabbit was on the menu). Turned out that it was a reunion of old classmates. I took the opportunity to ask them about good restaurants and Mr Pham Ly Minh Thong kindly recommended ‘Ban Xeo’ at Quan 46A Dinh Cong Trang. We made our way there by taxi and we were rewarded by a delicious meal. Ban Xeo is an omelette with bean sprouts inside which you wrap in lettuce and a thin sheet of rice. Scrumptious!
On the way back we dropped in at the jazz place which is managed by a saxophone player. Very good, but we were pretty tired and didn’t stay for long.
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