Walnut
2018hrs
Another thing I never did in America was eat a pretzel. The saddest words of tongue or pen are these: it might have been.
We went down to San Diego Zoo today. It's 120 miles, but Darin got us there in one and a half hours. They have car pool lanes here, which you can only go in if there is more than one person in the car. The idea is it moves faster, encouraging people to car pool and saving the world. Apparently it doesn't work, which doesn't surprise me because it didn't seem much quicker than the other lanes.
The maps we got on entering the zoo had on them a coupon for three dollars off admission to Universal Studios. Oh well.
There's not much you can say about a trip to the zoo. You just walk around and look at animals. A lot of the best ones weren't there - the Komodo Dragons won't be back until the fall (which surely this is, but there you are), and the pandas had been taken away to be experimented on, or something. But we did see a snake eating a rat, which was pretty cool.
Whenever anyone visits the zoo, their thoughts turn to the morality of such establishments, which is a bit like debating the ethics of cannibalism over a nice manburger. Most of the animals there have got a lot of room, though of course it can't compare to living in the wild, and many of them are endangered species, which they are helping to preserve. But there's a big difference between the good of the species and the good of the individual, and it's doubtful that it would be much comfort to the elephants to know that their imprisonment will ensure the continuation of their race.
If you don't think about it, you might expect the animals who suffer the most from their enclosure to be the intelligent ones, like the monkeys and the pigs (they have pigs all over the place in that zoo. More exotic pigs than the ones they make pork out of, but pigs nonetheless). But if you do think about it, these are animals which lie around doing very little in their natural habitat, and indeed they seemed quite content to do the same in an artificial environment. It was the creatures more inclined to spend their time stalking prey - the tigers, the polar bears - which seemed more bored out of their minds, and some of these normally more active animals were pacing up and down like expectant fathers. Possibly the zoo has had a particularly successful year, and they all were expectant fathers, but I doubt it.
Almost as odd as pigs, they had cats. Not just big cats, but things only one step away from common moggies. I don't know why some of these animals were in a zoo.
On the way back we stopped at a little cafe for some French fries. Like everywhere else here, they offered free refills of Coke. Such a service would be unthinkable in Britain. They had mini-jukeboxes on every table, and you could make them play a song over the speakers. It cost five cents, but the waitress gave us each five cents for that purpose. You never get service like that in Britain.
