together © Lilly Schwartz 2011

Another day of attempting to take pictures and this time we were in the zoo. Berlin has two of them actually: The “Zoo” and the “Tierpark”. Obviously before the reunification there was a need for that. Ezequiel and me went to the one in former West Berlin which is not very far from where I live – not very surprising since I live in an area called Tiergarten. When we came to the zoo there was a very long queue and we were already wondering whether we should just leave, but then a helpful soul told us that there were actually 4 queues and that the 3 others were actually much shorter. In the end it didn’t take long to get in at all. It’s quite pricey though: 13€ and 10€ as a student and it doesn’t even include the aquarium. The zoo alone is very big though and we didn’t even see everything before we got tired, so I think it was actually worth the money.

We obviously saw many many different animals, but my personal favourite were the big cats. We happened to go to the cat house during feeding time, so we could watch lions eat chunks of meat that were thicker than a human leg. Even the cubs were massive and looked dangerous! Very impressive! There were many big cats and also a few small ones that resembled our domesticated cats. They looked less dangerous, but I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to pet them. You might lose a finger or two! Also very nice was the basement of the cat house: it was full of nocturnal animals and they decorated the quite dark space very nicely with a sky full of LED stars. Not all the so-called “nachtaktiven” (German for nocturnal) animals were very active, although some of the bats were flying around like crazy. Generally the zoo is well worth a visit, although I have to say that some of the cages were rather small, especially for the big cats. They should probably have less animals on more space, well, like too many zoos.

And today I also learned some bits and bobs about my camera! This was thanks to my knowledgeable fiance Ezequiel who also happens to have a Canon EOS 450D. Since it was rather cloudy I played around with the white balance a bit and later I also used the aperture settings. The latter makes a nice and obvious difference for portraits. Only day 3 and the blog is already doing what I was hoping for! I’m learning!

The picture itself was taken when we were sitting and having a break near the bears.