Day 2

Day 2:

Yesterday my day started around 7:30 am, we woke up ate some leftover deep dish pizza, watched a bit of The Fugitive, then caught an Uber the lincoln park zoo.

Once at the zoo we realized that Google gave us the wrong opening time, that instead of opening at 9:00 it opened at 10:00 so we were wondering the zoo for an hour without other people there. The weird thing is there were almost no animals on exhibit until 10:30. This, of course, made us worry and question if the Zoo actually had animals. It did. The first animal we saw that was noteworthy was a herd of flamingos, that strangely enough had some gray flamingos sprinkled in with the usual pink flamingos. This is due to their diet. Pink flamingos get their color from shrimp so the gray ones just didn't eat enough shrimp. After some more exploring, we found the polar bears, the penguins, and the lions.

All of these were gorgeous and nice to look at, but the best place by far were the two primate houses. One was for small primates and included Monkeys Gibbons and Marmosets and other smaller primates.... 

The other was home to the larger primates. Such as the chimpanzees as well as some beautiful Gorillas. The strange thing about the gorillas was that they didn't actually socialize with the people they didn't look at the glass, but it was clear that they were aware of our presence but were proactively choosing to ignore us. This was different from every other animals reaction to our presence. 

After the Zoo, we decided to head over to the Shedd Aquarium.

 In contrast to the extremely empty zoo, the aquarium was jammed packed. the line almost backed out the door, so as we waited in line my dad bought the tickets in line and then we just skipped the line in its entirety. Once inside it was clear why it was so crowded, the aquarium was split up into tons of different sections with millions of different types of fish, In the center of the room there was coral reef with hammerhead sharks big barracudas and other fish, it was gorgeous.

As we went further we found an underground section where you could see dolphins and beluga whales swimming around, which was really cool and interesting.

More mini reefs exhibits like this were sprinkled throughout the aquarium... 

We caught a cab back home and discovered that we vastly preferred uber or lyft to a taxi, and relaxed at home for a while before heading out to dinner. When it came time for dinner we went to a five-star steakhouse by the name of boeufhaus. It was the best meal steak I have ever had, a 55-day dry aged ribeye. 

It was a perfect end to an amazing day of adventure.