Lauren's Birthday at the Zoo!

We've been wanting to get to the Artis Royal Zoo for a while but we finally went for Lauren's birthday!  We had a great time, there were a ton of animals to see and it wasn't crowded at all, we stayed for about 4 hours and saw maybe 30 people.  Lauren had a lot of fun climbing on top of various animals and dinosaurs!

 

We were really impressed with the gorilla exhibit.  The zookeepers gave talks about the animals at different times throughout the day and we were at the gorilla exhibit for a presentation there.  There were about 7 Dutch speakers and then me and Lauren and someone came talked to us about the gorillas and answered any questions we had in English.  There was also a baby gorilla that was born a week before we got there!

 

Lauren wanted to say hi to some of the animals but they ran away :(

  

 The elephants weren't scared of her though!

  

 And the turtles were pretty slow so we couldn't tell if they wanted to run away.

 

 There were lemurs walking around that you could go right up to.  Most of the animals were less fenced in than in American zoos, the walls were lower and sometimes moats were used instead.

 The mountain goats were one of my favorite parts of the zoo, they moved very quickly up and down the rocks and were fun to watch jump around.

 

Here is one of the vultures from their exhibit, some of them got to be very big!

 We got to see a bunch of giraffes too!

 

We were about to leave to zoo when we found an even larger penguin exhibit!

There was also a very nice aquarium included with admission that we were able to see.  There was another building with microscopic organisms that sounded interesting but we didn't pay extra for it at the time, we might need to go back!  It was a little bit dark inside but here are a couple pictures from the aquarium:

 We'd both definitely recommend checking out the zoo!