Today I had a really special day. Fabian took me on a date to the zoo, this might not sound that special but I've wanted to go to the zoo for 2 years since Mali the baby elephant was born - so it was pretty spectacular to get to go on a day and gorgeous as today was.
We did see the baby elephants (see after Mali was born, by some crazy luck another one 'Ongard' was born too - so now there are 2 babies at the zoo!) which are still small and one even drank milk from it's mum, which was surreal because I don't know why, but it never occured to me that elephants suckled and it was adorable.
While the elephants were showing off and being adorable and posing for photos (because they are completely aware that they are spectacular and that humans love them), Fab pointed to their watering hole which was being ignored for now. In the watering hole there was 1 mama duck and at least 15 ducklings that were joyously and somewhat naughtily swimming the expanse of the watering hole, they looked liberated and slightly mischevious as they swam in water that wasn't theirs. I have never seen so many ducklings and when Fabian said they were 'a plague of ducklings' I couldn't imagine a better kind of plague and the idea of it is still making me quite happy.
I wasn't that into the big cats because the size of the enclosure just seemed to be way too small. They all looked bored and too skinny so we moved on from them pretty fast. There were beautiful pelicans and a golden monkey that I can't remember the real name of - I found myself really appreciating animals I never really paid attention to before.
Oh and something completely cool happened in the butterfly house, It's not usually a display I like that much because it's so dense and humid in there but this time just as we were near the exit Fabian told me to stop moving and whipped out the camera:
Why yes, there IS a butterfly on my hatOh, and want to read about something infinately cooler than the butterfly on my head? Yeah - I bet you didn't think it got much cooler than that but it does.
There were turtles everywhere today and they were out in full force because of the weather. They were floating/swimming incredibly slowly on the very top of the water so their shells just peeked over the top of the surface. It must have been warm in the top few cm of water I guess.
Anyway, they were really stealthy because their shells are a really similar colour to the water they were in and every now and then we'd be looking at a bird or something else in the water when we'd spot a random turtle completely in sight that we'd been missing while staring right at it.
The turtles being out and about isn't the cool bit, the cool bit is this: we were eating icecream on the steps leading to the pond in the Japanese garden watching what we thought was only a lot of duck when, in typical turtle stealth style, about 10 meters from us appeared a turtle.
As we watched and admired it, the turtle slowly started to rotate on the spot until it was facing us, then, much to our delight, it started to float in our direction.
It very slowly swam right up to us, lifted its head out of the water and gazed at us for a few minutes. It was about 10 cm from where our feet were hanging and we couldn't believe it. It was so strange, like it had seen us and decided we were worth checking out.
When it slowly swam away Fabian remarked 'Do you think it just blessed us with 20 years good luck or what?' Which prompted us to remember the giant turtles in Vietnam and how lucky they are. They are considered to bring amazing luck and blessing to anyone who even sees one. So we promised if the turtle came back we'd drop a coin into the pond to respect the turtle god.
You may not believe this next bit, but I swear it's true. As soon as we made the pact, the turtle, which was a good 15 meters away from by us by then, slowly turned around and started swimming at us again and came so close to us that Fabian was able to put a 10c coin actually ontop of it's shell while it quietly stared at us.
It was totally amazing.
To end my pretty perfect day I just came home and managed to plant some strawberry plants and water my garden while there was still a little bit of day light left.
My gorgeous strawberry plantsNow i'm feeling happier than I have in a long time, i'm sitting with my laptop in my beautiful house listening to Missy Higgins. She always reminds me of Fabian and I feel i'm so lucky to have someone to love me so much and take me to the zoo and teach me to garden.
<3 N xx
