zoo!

we went to the national zoo on saturday! yeah! it was free!!

while this zoo is smaller than brookfield zoo in chicago, it had this cool "homey" feel. for example, we went into the invertebrate house and they were feeding these huge spiders. they let the spiders string up webs in this area of the house and then they feed them live crickets once a day. we happened to get there in time for it. spiders are amazing. i'm scared to death of them, but just watching them is cool. they sit in the middle of their web, which they have spun so that directly in the middle they can feel whether there is any movement at any part of the entire web. so when the zookeeper put a cricket down at the bottom of the web, the spider immediately ran to it and began wrapping it up. sweet!

we also got to see two pandas, giraffes, elephants, AND a big old hippo! did you know that hippos kill more humans than any animal? i'm almost 99% certain about that one! the zookeeper came and fed it while we were there. i've never actually seen a hippo out of water. it was huge and its mouth was overly scary. i guess they can snap a spine in two if they close their mouth on a person.

oh yeah, we also went to chinatown. to those from DC, don't bother yourself going there. chinatown pretty much consists of one block of a few chinese restaurants. the one we went to was pretty good, and very cheap. basically if you're already in dc looking for cheap chinese, try it out! if you're looking for something like chicago's chinatown, you're going to be very disappointed!