David and I had visited Wroclaw earlier this year for a work conference. It is a large city with a beautiful town square. But this time since we had the kids David wanted to take them to the Wroclaw zoo. We woke up to a little bit of snow falling. We made our way to the tram stop which is next to a grocery store. We checked the time and saw we had 5 mins before the tram came. We were out of water and the kids were hungry for some breakfast. So David ran across the road to the grocery market. 5 mins later the tram came and we were eagerly watching for David to come running so we could jump on the tram and out of the cold. And as the tram rolled away, David came running. So we missed the tram. On Saturday's the trams don't run as frequently so we had to wait 20 mins until the next one came. But we now had water for the whole day, and bananas to eat till we found a pastery shop.
We made it to the zoo and decided we would stay until we were freezing. We had fun. It is not a huge zoo, but it is much bigger than Boise and had all these different animals from different places in the world than i have seen at a zoo. We woke the bears up by throwing snow balls onto the grass near them.(the sign said don't feed them, but nothing about throwing snowballs at them) The monkeys heard us calling them and 30 of them came out of their hole in the rock to greet us. The seals put on a great show with their trainers showing off tricks. There weren't many people there, as it was cold, and snowing a little, but the animals were very aware of us being there.
One of the animals I had never seen was a black tree monitor. It is a black lizard that has this long coil like tail. It is all black. It is behind a plexi glass window and Kylynn was playing games with it. It would follow her around as she would move in front of it's window. And if she stood still it would try to reach for her thru the window. It was weird. As we all gathered to watch this different creature trying to get at Kylynn it made a jump towards David and crashed into it's window and fell to the ground. Don't worry, it was okay. It got up and moved around.
Another great show was with Bobbi the Chimpanzee. We teased Kylynn that he liked her, but that was only because she was standing in front of his window when he started to play by throwing a stick at the window where she was standing. He was a lot of fun. He would beat his chest, bang on the wood logs, and then jump around, grab a stick and bang it on the bars of his cage and then throw it as us and it would loudly bang the plexi glass window. The kids would squeal and laugh and he would do it again. One of the workers there said he loves to play and put on a show when he likes you. We stood there for a while watching him and having a great time. Plus it was warm inside the building.
After the zoo we headed off to see more of Wroclaw, which included the shopping centers. We stopped at 4 different malls that afternoon. Surpsingly they were all very close to each other and on the way to where we were going. We made it to the Rynek (town square) just after dark and found their city christmas market was well under way. The rynek was beautifully decorated for Christmas and it was fun to walk around and look at the home made crafts and treats for sale. We found a new knit hat for Savannah to keep her ears warm. She picked it out because she said it looked like bubble gum.
The next morning we were able to attend church with the Wroclaw branch. While still very small, they had a few other kids for a Primary and even a couple of young women (really, there were 2). David knew a family there and it was nice to meet them and visit. Mariuszh also came and Isabel was so happy she got to sit by him for sacrament meeting. After church we visited a bit and then hurried to the train station to see an old train pull in for the 5 hour ride back to Krakow. David looked at me and said do you want to take the later train? I agreed, and it was much nicer to wait the hour and a half. We need to get something for lunch as our snacks would not have held out the whole 5 hours for the kids anyway. So we were able to get some lunch and then take a much nicer train ride back home to Krakow. It was more money to ride the nicer train, but worth it.
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