Thailand: At The Zoo

It's 1:30 am.  Austin and I are watching Sesame Street and eating scrambled eggs.  We're jetlagged.  We arrived home on Friday evening (after an absolutely heavenly flight experience, thank you Austin) and headed down to Portland on Saturday to pick up Baxter (thanks Grandma and Grandpa Forsberg for the long babysitting job).  We came back today and, needless to say, we've all had a hard time adjusting to the time change and eventful traveling.  Toren and I have been averaging about 3 hours of sleep at night.  And Austin, well, he sleeps for a few hours every few hours.  It's like having a newborn again.  I know things will be much better in a few days, so I might as well take advantage of the house and update my neglected blog.  We have had the most incredible vacation!

With my Dad and Laura at work and John at school, we decided to venture out for a day at the zoo in downtown Bangkok.  There's a much bigger zoo a little further away, but this one was the perfect size for a couple hours.  Austin loved it. 

The best thing about the zoo is that they seemed to be much more relaxed about the distance between the animals and the humans.  We could have reached in and touched many of the animals if we tried (we didn't).  Even the crocodiles were behind just a 5-foot glass fence with a sign posted that read: do not reach arm in crocodile cage or accident may occur. 

Anyway, despite the warm weather, all the animals were out and about. 

We saw some insanely huge hippos (notice Austin's feet dangling just feet from the hippo's head).

Austin got to feed a baby goat.  It was so cute.  The little goat must have been hungry, though, because he kept ripping the bottle out of Austin's hands.  It only took about a minute for the goat to scarf down a whole bottle.

My personal favorite was the giraffes.  They are just so spactacular to see.  We got there just in time for feeding time, so the giraffes were pretty lively (as lively as a giraffe can get, I guess).  The male was particularly curious about us. He kept leaning his head down to us.

We planned on ending at the elephant exhibit.  when we got there, however, we saw no elephants.  We were quite disappointed...until we discovered that the elephants were actually on display for people to feed them.  It was a little sad to see them all chained up, but I loved feeding them vegetables.  Austin was a little scared (but, as you'll see in a later post, he eventually fed an elephant himself).