koln zoo

first of all, i am so sorry i have been awful about blogging lately! things have been pretty busy around here so i've neglected this. steve just put brynn to sleep so i'm going to take advantage of this alone time! its hard to do anything on the computer when brynn's awake as she loves to pound on the keyboard and begs me to show her dora and wiggles clips from youtube.

we had never been to koln (cologne), which is pathetic since its a little over an hour away, so we decided to see the city and take brynn to the zoo before we moved. i heard mixed reviews about the zoo, so i wasn't expecting much. some exhibits were under construction, so there were a lot of animals that we didn't see like the panda's and penguins. brynn was pretty bummed about this as she has been talking about panda's non stop (thanks to kung fu panda), but she got over it pretty quickly once she saw all the other animals. the weather was awful as expected, but we brought our umbrella's and tried to stay in the indoor exhibits when it hit hard. brynn always had to be in front of us leading the way, so we used her stroller to cart around all our crap.

we also were "lucky" to see a few things. first, it involved the hippo's. nasty nasty hippo's. the hippo's were housed in an indoor pool surrounded by a little mote with a friggin little rope that was 12 inches off the ground to prevent them from getting to the innocent bystanders (i've noticed that european zoo's/wildpark's have extremely low safety features). there weren't too many people in this exhibit, so we had no problem getting front row seats to the three fatty hippo's. steve pointed out all the brown marks on the walls around the hippos and claimed that it was nasty poo. i didn't believe him, and told him it was probably mud marks or something from them going outside in their court yard area and getting dirty. when we first approached them, they were all under the dark murky water with only their ears peaking out. so we stood there for a while watching them, and got all excited when the largest one started to come up higher and higher out of the water. brynn's stroller was in front of us with all our paraphernalia, including our nice cannon and my purse, and i was behind it watching the hippo's while brynn and steve squealed at how huge it was. well, THEN something not cool happened. as this fatty beast was standing up, totally exposing its nasty butt towards us, it starts wagging it's tail back and forth really fast and flinging POO all over towards us! we all scream and run for cover, totally forgetting to grab the stroller which was 4 feet away from this hippo's fat A. of corse the people that were in there, didn't see the nasty animal crapping, but saw 3 american's spazzing out and running away. they probably thought that this was our first time seeing hippo's and thought we were ridiculous.
so i return to the stroller expecting the worse, but luckily (considering there was TONS of nastiness flying our way) only saw some nasty poo on one of the wheels. i've been begging steve for a quinny zapp for a long time, so i took advantage of this situation telling him it would be easier to just buy a new stroller rather then clean the one wheel. i failed miserably. (after we got home, we checked out youtube and there were a ton of video's on poo flining hippo's. i guess that's how they mark their territory. nice huh? i'm so grateful that we got to experience that...)

next, it was onto the elephants. as everyone knows, elephants are huge. really really huge. by this time, the weather had started to clear up so we went to the outdoor elephant area to watch them. they had a ton of them out, including cute little baby elephants that brynn went crazy over. as steve and i were walking around the huge outdoor exhibit, we noticed two elephants paying really close attention to one another along with tons of people lining up to get a closer look, so we grabbed the camera and camcorder and followed their lead. i got a short video of what was going on, but i'm having a really hard time uploading it to youtube at the moment. i will try again later.

brynn checking out the jaguar.

pulling gum out of brynn's hair.

yeah...it didn't work out too well. but camels ARE yummy.

we were exhausted after the zoo, and decided to drive throughout the city instead of walking all over again as planned. it was getting a little dark by this time, so my pictures of the famous cathedral didn't turn out too well. but here are some pictures to give everyone an idea of what it looks like there. its absolutely beautiful and reminds me so much of notre dame in paris with the spires and flying butresses. koln is rad, and i'm so bummed that we didn't come out sooner! we have some really good friends that were stationed here a while ago that would go to koln almost every month to this argentinean steak resturant. we promised them that we we go, but failed to! i'm sure we will get yelled at now by julie and joe...sorry guys!