Animal Appreciation Day

Today we moved out of the student guesthouse to "house-sit" for an American family as they vacation in Paris and the States. I've developed an annoying cold in the past two days so I haven't left the house all day even though we really need to go grocery shopping for this week. I just hate going outside and dealing with all the stares.

Yesterday was a really fun day. Khoshal, Saria, Humali and I took a trip to the zoo! Besides the initial pseudo-war zone of the entrance (no really, the zoo staff was pushing, shoving and fighting with people in their attempt to organize the masses), the zoo was a relatively peaceful place. The majority of the animals were the malnourished versions of the species with the exception of the glorious Bengali tiger. It's a beautiful animal and if it were not endangered I'd want one as a rug or throw....At the zoo, we bought peacock feathers (that's THE official souvenir), ate snacks, got stared at A LOT, climbed a tree to take a picture and....rode on an ELEPHANT. It was a very scary experience. Getting on and getting off in particular. But it was great!!! Hopefully we'll get to do that again in Nepal ;)

After the zoo, we drove back to Banani and got lunch at Dhaba. On our walk back home, we saw a man selling birds. He had about six cages with beautiful birds on each side. Saria and I decided it was well worth it and bought two tiny birds. (We called them H5 and N1 since everybody and their mother freaked out about the nonexistent chance that they might be avian flu carriers). Since we're on the topic of the birds, I must report that this morning one of them killed itself. I found it with its head pushed outside the cage and of course it was stuck and probably suffocated. STUPID BIRD! So because we didn't want to touch a dead bird and didn't want the other one to develop post-traumatic stress disorder from being in a cage with a dead fellow bird, we let the other one go. :( So we had pet birds for less than 20 hours.

After buying birds, we stopped at Movenpick, an AWESOME Swedish ice cream parlor. We stayed there and chatted for almost 2 hours about being pre-med and med school with Khoshal (a 5th year med student in the Netherlands) and Humali (pre-med at Harvard). Afterwards, we walked back home and sunk into our domestic routines of laundry, facebooking and sleeping. :)