Today was wonderful! Marc had the day off of his internship, so we spent the day walking around and exploring. We spent the morning at Edinburgh zoo. It was very nice, but somehow all the exhibits seemed to be uphill. Very steeply uphill; you need hiking shoes for this zoo. The animal species and enclosures are fairly typical of most zoos in the states, with a few things I was impressed with. The public education of research was really neat; they have entire buildings illustrating the research they are doing with capuchins and squirrel monkeys. It shows there research set ups, and you can access the equipment and do the test task. They also have computer monitors showing spectrograms of vocalizations. Wonderful :) Also, I had never seen a bush dog before. Very rare, from south america, about the size of a cat. They live in family groups and make a neat squeaking sound. The zoo is most famous for its penguins. Not only do they have a voluntary penguin parade each day, but one penguin is honored by the military each year at the tattoo festival. His rank just continues to go up, and this past year he was knighted.
We then refreshed ourselves at an award winning hot chocolate place called chocolate soup, and then walked to Arthurs seat. We proceeded to hike to the top, and enjoyed a great view of the city. It is a very steep climb up, but since it is steep it goes quickly. With all the melting snow and ice, that also meant it was slippery, and there was lots of falling (at least for me...Marc is wiley and managed to stay on his feet most the time). But it was alright...with all the water, the scottish grass is more sponge like, so it cushioned the fall. This also turned me into a giant mudball.... but the view was worth it, you could see the whole city in rolling fog.
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