Chapter 17 – Trip to the Zoo

A few weeks ago now (sorry for the extreme delay) a student and I went to Kharkov zoo together. Ostensibly, for me to give him information on America as he was planning to go and work there for a while in July or August, as well as also to show me the zoo – one of the main attractions here. First however we had lunch at a nice little pizzeria in the park and chatted about US and every day life there. However since I’ve been away for so long, it was quite a task trying to remember what every day life is like there, but it was a good exercise for me so as to not forget completely. After gorging on some delicious pizzas we went to the zoo – about a 5 minute walk away from Freedom Square.

Excitement mounted as he paid for the tickets (a few gryvnia) and we crossed over the threshold. We enter and I look around with interested, foreign eyes. The zoo is much smaller than it’s counterpart in Denver. (By the way, the US sister city of Kharkov is actually Cincinnati.) We make our way past food stalls in the middle of the path and turn right to find the bears.

Recently renovated, the enclosure for the black, brown and polar bears (oh my!) still seemed to my western trained eyes as small and sad. The area was about half the size of that from the Denver zoo and was shallowly filled with really nasty green water for the black and brown bears and slightly less green for the polar bears.

We then went on to visit the snake and other creepy crawly things room, which was housed in what seemed an old bomb shelter – dark, deep beneath the earth with not much ventilation. I decided that if the children I saw here weren’t scared and running out of the building screaming, then I should try to be tough and emulate them. I saw some pretty amazing turtles, though again in cramped quarters. Luckily there were no spiders in this part so all was well unless one of the snakes decided to make a run of it and escape, which none of them did. Moving on we went to see the bird keeps.

There were the usual parrots of all color and size, then some owls and of course… chickens?! Yep, in case you’ve never seen a chicken on a farm you can come to the Kharkov zoo. Next to the chicken coops were the cages for the foxes. This seemed like a bad idea to me, like have a cat hospital next to a Chinese restaurant but hey, maybe it works for Ukrainians. Saw some foxes in a bit of a sorry state and smelling foully so we quickly moved on to the big players – tigers and lions!

Well, I won’t go through each and every animal we saw. Basically there were a lot of typical zoo animals like elephants and tigers, as well as some not so typical animals like wolves, Mongolian horses and a strange little black RUOS’ (Rodents Of Unusual Size). After seeing most all of the animals we headed towards the exit discussing the sad state of their habitats and life philosophies more generally. At the exit we parted company. Now I may cross of the zoo from my list of “things to see in Kharkov” list – one down, a hundred more to go!