28. Mrs. C. Birthday

Dear Emilee,

Today is Mrs. C. Birthday. All day long, she sighed, “I just love birthdays, especially mine”. She repeated herself so many times, I thought Mr. C. was going to cover his ears with his hands, but he just smiled and kept walking.

Yes, we walked all day.

Opps, again I started at the end of the story. In fact, the story began on Friday. Mr. & Mrs. C. said good-bye to me and left me alone at home. Mrs. C. said that I had enough excitement and she thinks I need some rest. So they took my picture by the blooming white Spathiphyllum, and left me at home while they went to the Shabbat dinner at the Khila. What Mrs. C. did not know was that I checked the web and found schedules for a surprise trip for her birthday today.

Yes, I arranged all of it. All Mr. C. had to do was to take Mrs. C. by the hand and take her to her surprise trip.

This morning, after we sang “Happy Birthday”, we caught the bus and rode to the 7:00 am train to Jerusalem. We arrived at 10:30 at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. And then, we walked all day.

The biblical zoo is a magical place.

The people at the zoo collected animals and birds from everywhere in the world, and are breeding them to populate the biblical land of Israel. Wounded animals and orphans are looked after in the zoo hospital and many nearly extinct species are being revived here.

A short movie shows the visitors how Noah collects these species in his 4000+ years ark and brings them to the zoo to make sure that they are saved and that they populate the land again.

Emilee, you will need to look at the birds and mammals in the pictures and see how many you and your class recognize and write their names in the comments. Each had its’ own sign near the cages but I did not write all their names down and by the time we returned home, all I could remember were the names of the elephants and the giraffes. Maybe you'll find some on: www.jerusalemzoo.org.il











The zoo was arranged by areas of the world and one was a Canadian section. The prairie dogs and the mountain goats were in there.










The bears at the zoo, had the same hump on their back as the grizzly bears, but they were small like the black and brown Canadian bears. They were Syrian.

By two o’clock in the afternoon, sand storms fill up the mountains around us and we were totally covered with fine dust. It tasted salty for some reason and when we showered later at home, it tasted like we just had a salt bath. Mr. C. said it was sweat, but we did not sweat at all we just got covered with sand. The day had no sun and was warm but not muggy. Weird.

I always thought that the Arbutus Trees grow only on Vancouver Island in BC, but here they were in the zoo! See, I'm hanging off one of them.











We caught the 4 pm train back to Nahariya and Mrs. C. just set all the way back with a great big green on her face. I think she had a perfect birthday.

Your Salty Tasted Reporter
Flat Stanley