[Written on Sunday - not able to publish cause the Hilton @ Manchester doesn't have Internet]
An hour gained today with the clocks going back, however very confusing at what-ever time in the morning, thinking about the old Finnish time and the new Finnish time, and then the old and new UK time, wondering what time it should be in my head and how sleepy I should have been.
A nice lazy morning today because we weren't setting off until 9.40, but it turns out that is what time the bus was to the zoo... So we had to wait around for 40 minutes until the next one. It was a big green bus with animals on it, saying Zoo Bussi down the side of it - I think we got on the right one. 20 minutes to the Zoo and a few euros later and we were staring a Lion in the eye, he seemed pretty sleepy so we moved on. It turns out he wakes up every hour when more people were around and he puts of a big 'king of the jungle' display by roaring and pacing in his cage, we'd only moved a cages down, so raced back to his enclosure to see what the fuss was about - typical male putting on a display for the crowd.
We managed to see some great animals to start us off, all the animals which were too lazy last time I was there had made an appearance, the Lynx, the Tigger, the red pandas. It was great! We made our round the island starting from the south moving around in a very logical way. We saw everything we wanted to, and the animals seemed a lot more awake today - must have been the cold...! The bears were even up and around, every exciting. We tried to get into the warm areas as much as we could and even better for me - we found a place I'd not been in last time I was here. It was the Asisa section, it was very humid but there were loads of cool animals, including snakes, turtles and that kind of stuff :-)
We got the bus back at about 13.30 and decided that with aching feet and doing more than we usually would over a weekend, we made it back to the apartment, via the supermarket to pick up some lunch. We both promptly fell asleep and woke up a few hours later, deciding that it was a little late to do much more so we started packing up and getting ready to set back to the airport. It was a bit of a miserable afternoon too weatherwise, the sun gods didn't grace us with their presense, but we'd had a great time so far, it didn't really matter too much.
Set off to the airport in good time and managed to squeeze in some shopping (last minute presents) and also some food. Still got another hour and 30 minutes before we take off, but because it's 'free seating' we're close to the front of the queue.
The flight was ok, but there was a really big bit of turbulance which lasted about 5 minutes, it was just as we were about to land but it was enough to throw you off your seat... I was glad to land, I think Amie was even happier to land. We got through passport control and got our bags without incident and the Hotel Bus came to pick us up. We got a really nice hotel room which was good, because we didn't plan on leaving it until we were thrown out - because the train the next day wasn't until 12:50pm. We had a great breakfast (full English of course) and set off on the train which was on time and not very busy. The bus home was full of kids (near where we lived) because it was kicking out time so we had to put up with that for 10 minutes, which wasn't too bad.
All in all, we had a really great time, we'd seen and done a lot, and are now really sleepy from it all. I have managed to check my 100+ emails so tomorrow isn't going to be as bad as I thought - trying to play catch up is something I hate doing... Can't wait for the next time we have this sort of City Break again :-D
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