March 22nd, 2008
resurrection
let's bring this blog to life, shall we?
yesterday was good friday and mom thought it would be cool to visit the Ocean Park Manila since we thought there'd be no people due to it being good friday and "patay si papa jesus." you know how conservative catholics view the holy week. the whole self inflicted pain and suffering bit. the whole abstinence thing. doesn't mean you can't have happy family time though. mom saw it in the news that ocean park and manila zoo would be open on good friday so off we went.
so there, we were at the place but it was jam packed. as in a line just to get in will make you wait for about an hour i would think. a janitor tipped us off that it was hella hot inside and they were making hte guests hurry to move through the oceanarium. i definitely want to take my time in these kinds of places (geek) so we all deemed it better to return when everything's in order. besides, there were still some construction on-going and that can't be a good thing. i definitely want to get my 400 peso's worth.
we left and drove for the manila zoo. my last visit was when i was still in grade school. back then i didn't appreciate a thing so i thought this would be a good trip, and it was. i was a little bit disappointed of the state in which the animals were in. i mean, the ostrich was half bald, there were mineral water bottles inside the crocodile cages, there were no signs with the animals' names for every animal, and the orangutan was eating a plastic bottle cap. one of the bird cages had a hole at the top and this resulted in the birds hanging out outside the cage rather than inside. i guess that was the reason why we saw a strange bird at the crocodile pen earlier in the tour. i guess the management is not solely to be blamed. uneducated visitors poke the animals and birds with sticks, throw water bottles at crocs, tap the glass walls of the pythons, and one kid even went over the fence to feed grass to the elephant. even if feeding is prohibited, they still go ahead and feed the animals with junk food. quite a sorry sight if you'd ask me. it was still a good trip though. my dad and i plan to write a letter to mayor Lim about that.
we were off to cartimar after the zoo trip and found that most of the shops were closed. there were a select few open though. monique just wanted to look at some dog stuff, mom wanted to look at plant stuff, and i wanted to look for glass tanks for my invertebrates. everybody was happy. i got some subdivided glass tanks for my babies. they look so much better in display now compared to my plastic food containers before. mom bought 2 turtles and some fish for the pond.
we finally headed home and prepared a dinner of barbecued liempo. we always seem to make it a point to eat meat on good friday. i remember last year, we had steak. not to worry, the liempo was neutralized with sinigang na bangus sa kamias. heavenly.
