The Seoul Grand Park is a huge area that includes an amusement park, a zoo, an art museum, a botanical garden, a rose theme garden (whatever that means), a petting zoo, a nature trail, and a campground. Grand indeed. It cost ₩3000 (~$3) for a ticket to the zoo and botanical garden which is inside and would have been another ₩1000 for admission to the theme park as well but I didn't even get to the park until 1 pm so I figured just the zoo was enough. In fact, I didn't even end up seeing everything before I was too pooped to continue.
As far as zoos go, this was a good one. Let me start off by saying that I LOVE the zoo. I used to watch a ton of nature documentaries on Discovery channel when I was kid (before it became all reality TV) and I think my love for the zoo is related. Anyway, there were some animals that I had never seen before. Most notable, the lesser panda!
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| These cuties were really popular so it was hard to get a good pic |
I also liked the slow loris, it was like a live teddy bear. I couldn't get a picture of it, sadly, because it was in the nocturnal animal building so there was no light. Just trust me, it was adorable. Another rarity/interesting thing for a zoo connoisseur (that's right, I went there) were the white peacocks. I don't think they were albino because their eyes weren't red, but all the feathers were white. I caught one giving it's little romance dance to a female peacock.
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| She was not impressed. |
They had some various 'deer' that look more or less like other deer but I don't think I had ever actually seen these particular species before. They also had a feed the Dall's Sheep area instead of goats. There is also a pet the kangaroo (technically wallaroo) area but I missed it because it's only for 30 minutes once a day.
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| You can pet this! |
The ape area was not as extensive as the one I'm used to at my home zoo, but the lion area was intense. They had at least 8 lions. While I was there, a trainer was throwing them chunks of meat and they were super excited. She was careful to make sure it was fair, but there was still some sort of uproar (get it?) at the end.
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| MMMEEEAAAAAATTTTTT!!!!!!! |
I was also impressed by the numerous free flight areas they had for the birds. The peacocks and pea fowl had one, there were two or three separate ones in the tropical bird building, and there was a huge one that people weren't allowed in for storks and pelicans and geese and the like.
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| tropical birds ^_^ |
The funniest thing for me was seeing a red-eared slider in one of the amphibian/reptile buildings. These things are so common at home that it was really weird to see one in a zoo with all the other much more exciting creatures.
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| Exotic? I think not. |
I looked over my map carefully while writing this and did not miss much, mostly just the South American corner (supposedly there are llamas) and one small area in the middle (not sure how that happened). One thing that I should have skipped but am really not sure why I didn't was the Insectarium (I don't think that's a real word...). As the name implies, it was full of bugs. Primarily tarantulas and scorpions. Ew. Super ew.
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| Why do I do these things? Why?!? |
And now, to wrap things up, a couple of photo mosaics of other cool things I saw!
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