A Day At The Zoo

For a week i had been super excited about going to Walibi World. It's a theme park in Holland, near the German border. We were all set to spend the day there on Tuesday, Wim, Lisa and Andre had even taken the day off work especially and the night before i walked around the whole evening randomly shouting out ''WALIBIIIII WORLD" On Tuesday morning i jumped out of bed and literally ran downstairs because we all wanted to get there as early as we could to avoid any crowds. This is where it goes wrong. The faces that greeted me when i walked into the kitchen were not the faces of people set for a day of Walibi World fun. Els broke the news to me, Walibi World was not open on Tuesdays. Apparently it is only open on weekends unless school holidays are on. Well. Fine then. I was so disappointed, in a way that a grown 22 year old woman should not be. But i really was excited about it, we were going to have a super dooper day of fun. Now we all sat around looking at each other thinking what we could possibly do today instead. Would you believe it took us almost 2 hours just to decide that we would go to Amsterdam. We had many ideas, Andre suggested we all stay home and watch him play playstation, with the chance of joining in, which i was quick to dismiss. We thought of ice skating, movies, Eeftiling, laser skermish, etc etc but finally after a vote Amsterdam was where we headed. Wim found a deal where we could go on a canal cruise and then go to the zoo so it looked like we were going to have ´A Day At The Zoo´.

We all piled into two cars, one for girls, one for boys, naturally, and drove the 45 mins to Amsterdam. Once in Amsterdam we parked the boys and girls cars at a carpark and bused it into the city centre.

We had to wait a while for the canal cruiser/boat/ferry/vessel to pick us up so we ate all the snacks that were supposed to last us the entire day.

The ferry came and then it was ´all aboard´ for our cruise over to the zoo. We spent a really fun day at the zoo, somehow we managed to see everything and stay together as a group! I won´t bother showing you every single animal we took photos of so i will try to narrow it down to a reasonable short list. 

After the Zoo we had to wait 50 minutes for the ferry to come back and pick us up. This time went very slowly, particularly because we had no snacks left. 

 

I went for a wander while i waited. Look what i found.

Squint. Squint and this almost says ´Lily´

It was so cold by the time the ferry arrived, i think for some absurd reason that when i see the sun shining i assume it is warm. This is not true, i have now learnt always go against your better judgement and wear that extra layer. But anyway the ferry came and saved us from complete boredom and cold. It whisked us away on a charming canal tour of Amsterdam.

 

smallest canal in holland 

smallest house in holland

Smallest bike park in holland.....NOT. Its actually the biggest, well the biggest (and only) one i´ve seen.

 

 This was the end of our ´Day At The Zoo´ We all trudged off the boat/ferry/canal cruiser and headed to the bus stop. Then Wim found this guy. 

A Swede in town for the soccer match that night, i probably don´t need to say it was Netherlands vs Sweden.   This was exciting because we were all going home to watch the game so everyone pretended there was lots of rivalry when in reality 2/3 of didn´t care about soccer at all. Also he nearly hit Paul in the head with his flag. 

Everyone agreed that even though the day started out so badly it ended up being really fun. And to really top it off Netherlands won 4-1.