AT THE ZOO

Some sunny days ago we headed out the Helsinki zoo; Högholmen.

As Eddi was out celebrating my sister's fiance's bachelor party Dag and I grabbed my sister along.

You can reach the Helsinki Zoo by bridge east of the city centre but we took the easiest and most popular route; the boat from the market square downtown.

Högholmen (Korekasaari) has some old beautiful buildings from the late 1800's.

Here's how it looked some 120 years ago.


Looking at different creatures...

...back in 1900-something... 

...atoday, in 2013. Dag loves animals and is totally fascinated by all of them - lions in a cage*, dogs being walked on the street.

*) Ok, we did not see the lions; they were sleeping off the hot summer day indoors. And the animals don't really stay in cages anymore either, I guess you'd call them yards or so...


Most interesting however were the geese (that we also have in the park in front of our house at home...). Dag donated most of his lunch to the small geeselings. (Or, to the ground at least. Most of what he eats himself tends to end up on the ground, fluffy bird babies or not.)

Bears in the old bear fort in 1900, which is still there, although of course empty. I always found it quite sad to think of the bears in it back then.

The bears have it a lot nicer today. Well most things are different with zoos nowadays.

I have however been to zoos in other parts of the world where the cages sadly looked like the ons from a few centuries back, with a lion lying apathic in the back and a keeper trying to raise it's interest by hloding a boar piglet from another cage in front if the bars. It was quite surreal, and I was reminded of a story of my grandmother in the 1960's hitting some zoo keepes in a zoo in Egypt with her purse  for seeing them maltreat an animal. (She really did that.)


The peacocks always strut around here and there in on the island.

We had a mini picnic in front of the mongolian horses.

And then headed to the ferry back home.

When we got back in to town Helsinki had turned into a samba carenval.

The old photos are from the SLS Helsinki archives.