lovely day at the Antwerpen/Anverse Zoo

This Bilingual country has at least two names for everything, hence the title...

I am painfully nursing my sunburn as I write this (ahhhh....good thing quality Belgian beer -- Kasteel-- has good analgesic properties).

We had a great day at the Belgian National Zoo today. We left soon after 10:00 a.m. in Kristin's car piling three kids and three adults into a five seater Renault (I'm sure that's not legal, but Kristin assures me an adult equals two children, so the number of seat belts was in keeping with Belgian highway traffic laws) and drove the fourty minutes north east to Antwerpen (Flemish)/ Anvers (French)/ Antwerp (English) zoo. We got there with no stress, little trouble parking and with bright and sunny moods, in keeping with the weather which was to reach 12 today under mostly clear skies. We sang camp songs the entire way there, and had fun teaching Kristin's daughter Lara the English versions of songs like "The itzy-bitzy spider" and "Ram-sam-samm". Her father is Welsh, but I bet they've not heard the same number of camp songs as Matthew and I have over the course of our childhoods. Our favourite today was the Sharon-Lois-and-Bram version of "We're goin' to the zoo this mornin'" sung at the top of our lungs. The Zoo is right behind the spectacularly renovated train station, a national monument to a communication and transportation giant that brought diamonds and money into this town like a massive pipeline. This is one of the largest settlements of Hasidic Jews outside Israel, so the children found people-watching on the city streets was as much fun as the animal watching within the walls of the zoo.

Not to be outdone, the entrance of the Zoo is also spectacular, designed with Romantic and Neo-Gothic architecture and lots of government money. In a city, zoos tend to be cramped, a little unnatural and a bit sad due to the close quarters for the animals...thankfully this was not the case, as the zoo was well landscaped, broadly spaced and well thought out for its day... it's not The Rouge River (East Scarborough where the Metro Toronto is located) but that, I think is the exception to the rule in zoo designing...

Doing research before we left for this activity, I found out that this attraction one of the oldest zoos in the world and is one of Antwerp's most popular attractions. With an animal population of over 5,000 and more than 950 different species, it attracts about 1 million visitors each year. This current zoo is located on 26 acres of prime real estate and a new expansion has been announced which by 2017 will add a surface of 15,000 sq m (4 acres) to the existing zoo. Interestingly, this zoo is also the global sperm-bank for five animals, including the okapi. This animal was introduced in the zoo shortly after its discovery in Congo. There are still several of these strange animals with long tongues in the zoo. More than 75% of the okapis in captivity have Antwerp blood. Some other notable animals out of the +900 species that we saw today were the Siberian tigers, Indian lions, Arabian oryxes, Indian elephants, gorillas, bisons, orangutans, penguins, pygmy gibeons, giraffes, foques (seals), and my personal favourite, the blue Macaw (thanks to a Canadian children's Author who wrote a marvelous book called "Sarah Saw a Blue Macaw"...penned by Jo Ellen Bogart and expertly inked by Sylvie Daigneault. The rhymes and pictures are perfect bedtime reading for my boys' ages, and many of the animals in the south American rainforest depicted within these pages were also part of our discovery today...
Now in order to make the first days of our spring literally a splash, yesterday Matthew and I cleaned and heated the pool so that there'd be something to refresh us upon our return today...at 16 degrees in the water and 12 degrees out, Matthew and Duncan certainly found their VERY quick dip in the piscine the epitome of refreshing...as my husband shivered up the stairs of the shallow end, he jokingly said, "I think I've been turned inside out--I'm a woman now darling"!

Pictures to follow in Matthew's blog once I find the camera in our chaos of picnic debris, discarded towels clothes and sweaters and the clutter due to the neglect of the house during the best outdoor weekend so far of 2008.