Weather: Warm, sunny, and melting
Been busy. Here's some photos from my last week in DC.
Took this on a weirdly foggy day. We hardly ever get fog, and it just made the woods look so cool.
A friend and I went up to Sugarloaf Mountain, a small mountain north of DC which wouldn't be remarkable except that the surrounding area is generally flat. Sometimes you can see it from DC, a small lump on the horizon on clear days. We went there every fall in high school and had meeting at the top, and while I generally hated those silly school trips and all the assholes at that school, I always loved being up there, looking around at the Maryland countryside below. I think that place must have been a sacred spot to Indians, before the settlers killed them all.
Took this photo from the road at the base of the mountain. In real life, this field had the most amazing shade of green, which the camera just couldn't seem to capture, but it turned out okay anyway. The branches dripping down from above with the little balls all over are sycamore branches.
Some photos I took at the zoo. I broke my vow never to go to the zoo, which I made 8 years ago when I became vegetarian, partly because I figure if I'm eating animal products again, why the hell not, and partly because I was hoping to see cheetah cubs. Well, the cubs weren't on display yet, but I took some nice pictures of other animals: tigers, a gorilla, an adult cheetah, an African crowned crane, and a hooded merganser. I also saw a couple of Mexican wolves and a red tailed hawk, but I couldn't get good pictures of them through their cages.
In the big cats section, there was this caracal which was pacing angrily back and forth in its tiny enclosure, clearly suffering extreme anxiety and stress from its captivity. The other animals all looked frustrated and bored as well. It just really reminded me of why I'd been boycotting zoos for so long. I mean, the fact that we put living things on display for our own amusement, in completely inadequate environments, is just wrong. I know zoos get people to care about animals, and some zoos (including this one) do reintroduction and work for habitat conservation, but they don't have to do it like that. What about wildlife sanctuaries, where the animals have some room to move around, to get food for themselves instead of sitting around waiting to be fed? That would be much more interesting for visitors anyway.
