London continued

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've been either out of town or swamped with homework the last two weeks.

Anyway, back to London. Friday, I went to the London Zoo. Why travel all the way to London just to go to the zoo you ask? I asked myself the same question.

Reason 1: Opened in 1828, the Zoological Society of London's London Zoo is the oldest scientific zoo in the world.

Reason 2: The cost of ticket was subsidized by Notre Dame's London Program.

Reason 3: ... All my friends were going.

And so I went to zoo.

Highlights:

The walk there took us past the University of Westminster, formerly the Polytechnic of Central London or Regent Street Polytechnic, where Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason met as architecture students and formed the band that would later become Pink Floyd.

The walk also took us through Regent's Park, one of the Royal Parks of London. It was gorgeous. I saw a pink pram near some purple flowers and attempted to document this as subtly as possible, the results are as follows:

One we got to the zoo, one of my favorite exhibits was a large, inflatable tent that housed moths and butterflies. The entrance was a series of, for lack of a better word, drapes, very much like those of a car wash, except these were primarily plastic. The interior was very humid and full of flowers, small children, parents, moths, and butterflies. The moths and butterflies were everywhere, in the air, on the flowers, on the walls, it was very pretty.

I found this butterfly especially interesting because its wings were largely transparent:

And this moth, because it looked dead in person, but it wasn't, or so the sign next to it claimed:

My other favorite exhibit was the BUG HOUSE. It was pretty great. It also housed fish. And yet it was called the bug house. There was an ant display with ropes between various encaged ant colonies. Here are the ants, on the ropes, all out in the open, going about their business:

Look! Ants!