Accidental Day at the Zoo

This past sunday, we woke up and in frantic mode (as mornings are in our house) got ready and went to church. Unbelievably, we actually got there early. And by early I mean 3 minutes early. And who knew that when you get to church 3 minutes early, there are so many empty parking spots so close to the front door. So we go to the church and we realized we are still not getting all the announcements in church - I blame Brad, he's better with Danish, he should be catching those important things. =)

That's right ... church wasn't until 2pm that day. They were having some other sort of activity that morning so church was switched until that afternoon. Ok, now some things were making sense ... like why there were so many spots in the parking lot and also our plans for the day.

Let me explain. See, the previous sunday we had been invited to go to one of the pastor's houses after church this week. He had asked us to come over directly after church (which gets over about noon) and then we would have coffee at 4 and pizza at 6. That whole week we were a little nervous about spending like 7 hours at someone's house who we barely knew. Hopefully we would have a lot to talk about and hopefully we get along. Ok, so now that we realize church is getting over at 3:30, the invitation makes so much more sense.

So, what to do? Do we drive back to Brønderslev or find something to do in Aalborg? We decided to go to the zoo. We weren't really prepared for this, it was a bit cold and didn't have all our winter gear and I had heels on. Brad didn't think that was a problem (easy for him to say). But ... it was actually a fun relaxing way to pass the time and Broderick was very excited for a surprise visit to the zoo.

Like I said, it was a little cold. The poor monkeys were just huddled together by a rock hugging each other. I felt so bad for them. Broderick kept calling the big gray haired baboon the grandma monkey. Grandmas ... I'm not sure if you should be offended or not. HaHa.
As we were walking along, outside one of the buildings we see these buckets with pieces of meat sitting there with labels for which animal they go to. By meat, I mean limbs and heads of animals. It was disgusting. Double click on the picture and you can see it in better detail. These are for the male and female lion.
Daddy and Broderick with the giraffes.
Since it was cold out, many of the animals were inside the houses. Broderick hated going in them though because of the smell. Here he is plugging his nose in disgust. We wanted to go in them to warm up a little, but the whole time Broderick was crying to leave. Its "yucky"!
This is a "sut træ" or a pacifier tree. One tradition here is when your child gets rid of their sut, you take them to a sut træ and they hang it there. We have been talking to Broderick about visiting the tree and we found one at the zoo. Yes, yes, I know my boy is 3 and still has his paci (mainly for sleeping) - BUT in my defense with all the traveling and airplane rides, having something that I knew would help him sleep was so nice to have. Anyways, that is a discussion for a different time. Broderick was not so excited to hang his there and we didn't have it with us, but I thought you might be interested in seeing one.


And we had a good time with our pastor and his wife. They made some great homemade pizza and we had plenty to talk about. Still not sure I would have wanted to be there for 7 hours +, but the day turned out great.