Four Days In...

... and the verdict is that I'm completely certain the rest of my adventure is going to be fantastic.

Over the weekend, I got to know my roommate a lot better. She is very nice, and we get along well despite the fact that she is more extroverted and party prone than I am. She is Persian so we have a bit of a language barrier sometimes, but she is very good at English so we get on alright. Over the weekend she took me to a gathering (at a wonderful and really close by park) with some of her Persian friends who also go to school here and we did a lot of picture taking and sports like frisbee and fake volleyball. One game that they taught we was a Persian variation of dodgeball. There are two teams, one of which breaks into two parallel lines and the other team is in the middle. With one (soccer) ball, the outer team passes the ball back and forth and the inner team tries to dodge. If you're hit you're out and if you catch the ball, one of your out teammates can come back in. When all the people are out the teams switch.

My roommate and I also found out that the park has some lovely bike paths that are great for jogging. Unfortunately we also discovered that if you stay after dark, which apparently you aren't supposed to, a police car drives down the path to look for you and give you a stern warning. Oops.

I also LOVE the Toledo Zoo. Every exhibit I have seen so far has been roomy, well-built and well-designed for the animals that they are holding. I was told that they are really well funded because they receive money from the taxes of people living in Lucas county, so on Mondays anyone who lives there gets free admission.

As a primate intern I will be working in the four subsections of the "Primate" section. Primate is in quotation marks there because it includes primates and other random animals that didn't really fit with any other animals. I am working for about two weeks in a section then being switched to a new section. I started in with the gorillas; the other sections are orangutans, primate forest (which includes several different species of primate: lemur, gibbon, colobus, langur... I think there might be one more but I'm not sure off the top of my head), and M&M (This section is mole rates and more, or the miscellaneous mammals that are supposedly the small mammals tacked on to the Primates and Small Mammals group:naked mole rats, fruit bats, spotted-necked otters, dingos, cheetahs, and today we added camels).

There are four gorillas: the silverback is Kwisha, and the three females are Nia, Jo(hari), and Kitani. They have such fantastic personalities and I've really enjoyed the past two days working with them, despite their tendency to bang loudly on things when they get excited or just because. I've done quite a bit of cleaning of course, but I've also gotten to help with diet prep and distribution, enrichment, and all sorts of other exciting zoo keepery things.

Today was super exciting. I got to hand feed Kwesha some chow (he is 435 lbs. no big deal) so that we could separate them to clean part of the stalls before they went outside. Then I went to go watch a procedure when one of the animals was put under to get x-rays on his healing surgery to fix his torn acl. To finish off this very cool day I also got to watch some training for the baby lemurs. There are currently two babies and they will soon need their vaccinations and so they need to be trained to separate from their mothers and go with a keeper without them or their mother getting too upset.

Then I went to a place called Lotus Yoga and signed up for classes. The atmosphere of the little place was lovely and I can't wait to start tomorrow.