Fires

There have been some fires around here. You might have seen them on the news, for example The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, the BBC. We're a long way from any of them - there's a nice map from the LA Times here - we're right next to LAX airport, on the left. It's harder to get further from any fire that's currently burning, or anywhere that even could burn (Pasadena's a long way from any fires too, but there's plenty around Pasadena to catch fire).

However, we're still being told to stay indoors - yesterday outdoors activities at school were cancelled, and at least one child had trouble with their asthma. There's a very slight dusting of ash on everything - you can see it if you run your fingers along something smooth like a car (and as someone said, some of that ash used to be someone's house). The traffic is, apparently, worse than usual, because so many roads are closed too.

Animals (2)

We went to the Hollywood Safari Park which, despite it's name, is nowhere near California - it's in Germany. (There is a Hollywood connection, but I never fully grasped it.) It's a safari park, with animals, and then a bit of a theme park.

The whole place is a little like it's been trapped in a time warp, with almost nothing done to it for 20 years. There are some white tigers, with a sign that proudly announces (in English and German, which is how I know) that they hope to have produced offspring by 1989. The sign talks about only two white tigers, but we saw more, so maybe the offspring were produced (maybe we saw the offspring? I'm not sure how long tigers live).

The monkeys were in a large enclosure, with a train that went around it. The monkeys jumped on the train and the passengers could feed them popcorn through the bars of the cage.



Here's Alex on an electric boat. You put in 50 cents, and the motor started, and then when the motor stopped, you hoped the boat was somewhere near the edge, so you could retrieve your offspring. If it wasn't, you threw coins at the boat until your child manages to catch on and put it into the slot, and then the process repeats.
There was a petting zoo with goats, which you could feed popcorn to. The shop that sold the popcorn that was next to the goats was shut, so no one had popcorn. We had popcorn (from the monkeys) so the goats were very excited.

Here's a camel. And the back of Dan's head.

S had bought corduroy jackets for the boys with patches on the elbows (so they looked like teachers). She was determined to get a photo of them together in a car ride. They were determined not to. A compromise (of sorts) was reached by Dan sticking his foot in the air, in an attempt to spoil the photo.

Animals (1)

The

Germans (and all continentals, as far as I can tell) have a different attitude towards conkers. When I see conkers lying on the ground, I can barely resist the urge to scoop them all up and take them home. (Actually, I don't resist the urge, but I usually only pick up a couple). People from other countries don't seem to realise what prized possessions they are, and ignore them - one sees huge piles of them on the ground, in the middle of cities. We visited an animal park type of place (a bit like a zoo) in Bielefeld. Outside was a trailer and two large containers, full of conkers. I started to fill my pockets (as you would), imagining that they had picked these up and place them here so that people would take them away. But I had it the wrong way around. You were supposed to give them the conkers you have collected, and they feed them to their pigs.

Shocking.

We arrived (coincidentally) at feeding time for the bear. (It used to be bears, but one of them is no more). Opa always brings the boys to look at the bear(s) and they usually have no interest, and wander away, leaving Opa disappointed. Most commonly they see something boring and commonplace and get much more excited about that than about the bear in the distance ("Leaf!" or "Cow!").

This time it was feeding time. The bear was was given a selection of fruit and vegetables (or fruits and vegetables, as it always says here), and two dead pigeons. To make things more exciting for the bear, the foodstuffs are hidden around the enclosure. The bear found a carrot first, but moments before it ate the carrots, it smelled (I'm guessing) the pigeons, spat out the carrots, and extracted the pigeons from the cranny they had been placed in.

The bear made fairly short work of the pigeons - it chose to pull or bite bits from the pigeons, rather than chew it up and swallow them whole, but the ease with which it pulled the wings off before eating them made me even less anxious to meet a bear that didn't have an electric fence separating me from it.

The boys have become enthusiastic about taking photos with my camera. This means we get a lot of duff photos, and the odd reasonable one. It also removes any burden I might have felt to document our lives. Here's a couple of the more successful ones.

First, a bear with two pigeons in its mouth:

A deer. Aim: Good. Angle: Poor.

Back from Germany

We arrived back from Germany last night, where we'd been for two weeks. I tried to blog from their, but the computer crashed and it demoralized me, so I didn't. Photos, and some blogs later.