jurong bird park

aina woke up talking about birds. she told me that in her dream, she was an owl… a baby owl. and i was her mommy owl. and she went on and on about all kinds of birds. then, i thought i should take her to Jurong Bird Park. maybe today… we don’t have any plan for today anyway…
so, after finish some errands, around 2:30pm, we hailed a cab and took off to the bird park. the cab driver kept telling us that today is too hot to walk around the park… i tried not to listen to him.

we had our late lunch at the park (an $8.50 chicken rice! damn, it’s expensive!)… aina asked if we could rent the motorized scooter. no. i haven’t been to the gym, so this will be my exercise for today. i have to admit that i was impressed with the types of vehicles to rent: wheelchairs, Radio Flyers wagons, Maclaren Volo strollers, and that motorized scooter that aina wanted…

the first stop was the owl enclosure. it was dark and creepy… aina walked as quickly as possible, trying to get out of the place. but the snowy owl is pretty.

there was a bird show going on, where colorful parrots flying through hoops held by the spectators. aina, even though she was scared of the loud sound, was super interested in the parrots… until a guy in vulture costume showed up. then aina was way too scared to watch the show. too bad, because it actually started to get cool with an egyptian vulture flying around the arena…
to avoid the show, we decided to we take the monorail. the park was rather empty and we were the only people in the monorail. so we got to sit behind the driver.

we then stopped at the second (out of three available) station and went to see the hornbills.

they’re pretty and colorful, but aina wasn’t too impressed. some of the hornbills flew closer to us whenever we come over near their enclosure, which i thought was rather cute. maybe they’re hungry?
after looking at the lesser birds of paradise enclosure — whatever that means, lesser? not as paradisey? more like world-ish? — we were back on the monorail, heading for the African enclosure.
and African enclosure was rather impressive. there are so many birds flying around in this huge enclosure of large bird cages. within the enclosure, there were a few wooden bridges and a very tall waterfall… yep, waterfall…

aina was sooo excited upon seeing the waterfall (and got a bit scared once we got near it).
upon seeing the mount of loose birds walking and flying around, aina went nuts. she has always loved to chase birds. so, here, she just had to chase every single one of them. she got really busy looking and running around.

we were too lazy to walk, so we took another ride with the monorail which took us back to the main station. we passed the pink flamingoes, which aina loved.

 

then as i promised aina, we stopped by the playground, which is located on the side of the lake. there, an accident happened. a little boy came over to aina, grabbed her face and scratched her eye… that was random. but painful.

after spending an half an hour at the playground, we went to the South Asian enclosure, which is the closest from the playground. there, we met many types of peacocks and peahens.

as usual, aina was busy chasing the birds… until we bumped into a blue papua peacock, who ran and chased us around the enclosure. yes, we were chased the a bird…. and this is the angry bird (yes, i had time to snap his picture):

aina panicked and super scared… i guess that’s what you call karma. or maybe all those birds that aina chased earlier prayed so that aina would feel the same way as they did.
anyway, since then, aina stopped chasing birds.
after taking pictures of the pretty mandarin ducks, we headed out. the gift shop wasn’t that interesting, and everyone there were cleaning and getting ready to close their shops. oh well, it’s almost 6… i guess it was really time to go home.
more photos in the jurong bird park oct 2010 album.