Trip to the Taipei Zoo

Tuesday is my shortest day of classes and the weather here was amazing. Nice breeze, not too hot, not too cold and the sun was out. The Subway Metro that I take to classes everyday continues on and dead ends at the Taipei Zoo. I wasn't sure when I'd get another chance to go there with such fine weather so I figured instead of studying in the afternoon I'd go check out the zoo.

Taipei Zoo...hmmm why does that sound familiar you ask? Oh yes, if you remember back in 2004, there was a guy who jumped inside the lion exhibit and started talking to the lions. He was shouting, "Jesus will save you!" Maybe Jesus will save the lions, but Jesus didn't save the guy from getting attacked. I can't imagine why Christianity gets a bad rap?

I was an idiot and forgot my camera so I don't have any pictures. It was pretty cool. As you can imagine if you can jump inside the lion exhibit, the animals are very close to you. This is a great thing about Taiwan, they don't have such strict safety measures, so you never know what might happen.

The best part of the zoo was the animals I've never seen before, mostly from Malaysia and Australia. Many, many kinds of monkeys and they had a very cool butterfly area where there were hundreds of butterflies just flying around inside the Isectorium. I was hoping to see the spider that was inside our apartment, but there were no spiders at all in this zoo.

I'm originally from St. Louis, and that zoo stands out as the best I've ever been to, plus it is FREE! I've visited the San Diego Zoo as well and that was nice, but there was something about the "fear factor" of the Taipei Zoo that makes me like it so much. I could have easily jumped into the rhinoceros or elephant exhibits, but obviously didn't. Kind of like thinking of swerving into oncoming traffic in the opposite lane...you'll never do it, but there's that voice in the back of you head saying, "I wonder what it would be like?".

Jim