Animals, animals, animals, animals, animals everywhere

Sunday was Zoorasia, which was the best zoo I've seen in Japan. The cages and pens were very big, and spread out over a wide area. Much walking had to be done to get around the whole place. The polar bear's enclosure looked especially good, and there was even a toy in there for it. And they have okapi. Okapi! At 600 yen it is great value as you can spend the whole day there.I still feel sorry for elephants though.

Due to the school's foundation quite a few years ago happening to be on June 5th, today became a holiday. So Mari took the day off and we went to Epson Shinagawa Aqua Stadium. This was my second attempt to visit there. The first, last summer holidays, ended when the line of school children waiting to get in didn't. Just what I NOT want to do on the school holidays is spend more time with kids.

But on a Monday of non-school holidays it was just fine. The whole facility is really beautifully presented. And it's quite amazing that one can see dolphins, penguins and sea lions right in the middle of Tokyo. But it must be said that the aquarium is too small. One could walk around the tanks in a few minutes if you weren't taking the trouble to look closely. And we did stroll and look, but we were expecting it to be at least more than one floor so we were checking our maps in confusion after we'd failed to find any stairs going anywhere else when we'd returned to the exit. We ended up spending almost 3 hours there, but mostly that was waiting for the sea lion and dolphin shows (45mins wait + 2 shows of 15mins each), which we felt we'd better stay and watch as without them we'd just spent 1800 yen on a few, albeit pretty, tanks.

Man, dolphins can jump high. I estimate one especially leapy critter reached 6 metres out of the water.