It was Easter, I had time off and no travel planned, all of my friends were on the beach and I was sat at home feeling very sorry for myself indeed. Spent a few days sleeping then thought "no, bugger this, I am going on an adventure!!". Sent my ex room mate Emily a message and we made plans to go to the zoo. Now, my friend Mike had repeatedly warned me about the Zoo, but hey I am stubborn and well I like to see things with my own eyes.
In the morning I took a look at the Zoo's website which actually makes the place look like a nice day out. Here is the link
http://www.gizazoo-eg.com/ , looks nice right? So here is the grand entrance to the zoo,
it is located on one of the busiest streets in Giza not far from the Israeli embassy (I mention this because recent protests took place in front of the Embassy and the Army sprayed tear gas, this gas drifted over to the zoo and the animals could be heard howling!) We paid the "foreigner price" for our tickets which was 20le, I wonder how long this has been the case as wherever I read reviews on the Zoo written by foreigners, they always states the entrance price as being 1 or 2 pounds, I was quite worked up about this but Emily calmed me down and said "we are here now so yalla" or something to that effect.
Once inside, the first thing we saw was a caged Persian cat! We began to laugh at this and wanted to take a photo, unfortunately a group of young men saw us laughing and thought that two laughing foreign females simply had to be easy sluts and proceeded to bless us with profanities, we decided to vacate the area and failed to get a picture of the cat.
A few minutes later, I accidentally made eye contact with a teenage boy, I am actually quite good at not making eye contact these days but every now and then it happens, and damn don't I pay for it when it does, these boys followed us for ages, shouting at us and making vile gestures; I would say they were the worst behaved animals in the Zoo. We tried our hardest to shake them, we threatened to call the police (big laugh, this was post revolution and there wasn't a police man in site), we tried to shame them in front of others (also a big laugh, people stared and laughed at us), we tried hiding in the Hyena house but it was far too depressing. Finally I started to take pictures of them and they fled. We headed over to the lions....
which I think were the most sorry looking things I have seen in my life, the cage was a concrete prison smaller then my living room and the inmates were bored out of their lives and skinny as hell pacing back and forth, their manes were matted and it was just cruel, cruel, cruel, I was truly disgusted, at this point a zoo keeper asked if I would like to pay a few pounds to hold a lion cub; I looked at him with my very best "you are an idiot" face and walked away. The next stop was the monkeys and if you look at the following pic carefully you can see the zoo keeper encouraging punters to poke the monkey with a stick. Do I need to say anything further on that matter?
A few minutes after taking this shot, we saw visitors poke a bear with a stick and feed the monkeys cookies and chips. I was at boiling point and it started to rain so we though it best to leave and went to eat cup cakes in Zamalek.
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