Excursion to the zoo

Butterfly enclosure

I'm all tuckered out! I drove six loud, energetic 8 and 9-year olds to the zoo today. We followed the school bus that had the rest of the third grade class and parent volunteers. It's Tokyo, so we spent more than three hours driving there and back (and the zoo is only about 22km from school).

I have to say that it's a pretty good zoo, though, especially as compared to the other big zoo in Tokyo, Ueno Zoo, which almost makes you cry in places.

The zoo has a whole Australian section.
It was at this point that I wanted to
run around shouting, "I'm Australian." But
I restrained myself!

Aside from tiring, it was a good day. I'll let the photos tell the story:

Investigating insects.

A seriously large wasp—thankfully a model. These were
"my" four boys.

But there were some very large bugs,
some of them even alive.

I loved the butterfly enclosure. I was "in charge" of four
energetic boys, and they didn't hang around looking at
mere butterflies, they were after the large cats!

My favourite photo.

Some nice African animals.

The lion enclosure bus. They put meat on the outside
of the bus, which, of course, the lion got a tiny bit
excited about. In general, though, they looked
pretty bored.

One of most shocking things about the day was the
approximately 5,000 other children who were there,
most of whom were under school age. Most of them
were in groups like this, with colour-coded hats.
Thankfully it was a big enough zoo that we didn't feel like
we were fighting through crowds, but everywhere you
turned there were more kids!