Mama monkeys???

You know you're going to have a good day when you see a sign like this. Who knew tigers pee in faces?


Josh had a day off of work this week so we decided to check out the Okinawa Zoo and Wonder Museum.

It's actually really close to our house and not expensive at all, I'm sure we'll head back here often. We stopped in the shop right away to get a drink and a snack and there I spotted this sunscreen. These people do not play around with Mr. Sun.

I wasn't sure what to expect of the zoo because I've been quite spoiled by Brookfield Zoo while I was growing up. Okinawa zoo is definitely not Brookfield. You know how the habitats are as close to their natural environment as possible and sometimes you need clairvoyant abilities to actually find the animal in the exhibit? You're not going to have that problem here. It was kind of sad though, these were not the kind of cages I would want to live in. The tigers had the same amount of space as the raccoons. Not very fair.

The positive side of that though is that Thomas could actually spot the animals. This little bat was so cute. Bats are everywhere here, you see them flying around pretty often, but this one, he's my homie now. He looked right in my eyes and crawled around in front of Thomas like he was putting on a show.

Then Josh pointed out this spider....if you need some perspective, that little brown spider to the left hand corner is about the size of a big wolf spider in Illinois. EEK!
This is the monkey that Thomas called mama. Maybe he thought it was wearing makeup?

I found it very appropriate that this sign was just a little askew.
Despite the sad looking enclosures, anytime we saw handlers with the animals, which was often, they seemed to really love them. He was just rubbing his elephant friend and watching him eat.
If I had found a lion for Thomas to sit on I would have done it, but this is as close as I could get to a cheesy big cat photo op.

The zoo is tiring. It's very hilly. So were very glad to hang out in the cooler Wonder Museum.

He's a giant! There was a giant chair too that would have made him look tiny but it was always full of kiddos.
Josh and I were pretty excited about this wall, but Thomas was freaked out so we moved on fairly quickly. Maybe next year he'll be all about it though.

Liquid magnets, they moved based on sounds. It was freaky, and cool!
People sized kaleidoscopes. Thomas would have stayed in these for hours.
I don't know how this worked at all, but you stood in front of the screen and it captured your movement. The look on T's face when he realized that the picture moved when he did was priceless. He started waving very enthusiastically.
Most of the Wonder museum was for older kids and we were hungry so we decided to head out. We had a really good time there though. You can rent little pedal boats and you can fish there or feed koi fish. There were also rides and a stage so we'll be sure to go back and try out the things we missed this time.