Smiles guaranteed

This morning we packed five adults and two kids into a sedan and took off toward Entebbe to visit the zoo. A side note, it seems there are very few rules of the road here. The main principle is that everyone just keeps moving. Most days when we drive through town, I am shocked that people aren't getting hit right and left. And, there are no car seats, so we've got babies being held on laps, kids in the front seat on laps, anything goes. Don't judge - we're just going with the flow.

Fortunately we were driving on fairly peaceful highways today. I loved looking at all the shops and reading the signs along the road. "Jesus Winner Ministries", "Shoes, Shirts, Brankets" (fitting as many Ugandans pronounce Ls as Rs and vice versa), and my personal favorite, "Kampala Snake Park, Smiles Guaranteed." There were also an inordinate amount of wooden bed frames for sale in many places along the highway. I'm not sure what the deal with supply and demand is with that one. 
 

We had a great time at the zoo. There were only a couple of other customers while we were there, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Our little guy was ecstatic just to have some open space to run in. (While our guesthouse has many positives, there is very little grass and the main place to play outside is a concrete walled driveway.) We saw otters, giraffes, rhinos, zebras, chimpanzees and several kinds of monkeys. At one of our first stops, our little guy saw a red crested crane (the national bird), which is about the same height as he is, along the walkway. He started walking toward the bird and we watched him getting closer and closer, to the point where they were within a foot of each other. The crane decided it'd had enough and started to spread its wings and charge at our little guy. That scared the pants off him and it took quite a while for the tears to subside. Even though it was fairly traumatic for him, we have to admit that we laugh when we think about it or look at the picture. We'll just have to put that one in the learning experience category.

We ate lunch in the zoo restaurant and the food was actually pretty decent. After the first bird incident, I started to get a little nervous when I saw a peacock walk in the doorway and start coming toward our table. It got within two feet of us, but no one freaked out, so all was well. 
 
I wrote in a previous post how we had taught the little guy to write the letter "A". When I was first showing him and explaining it, I said in kind of a sing-songy way, "Up, down, across". So, when we sit down to draw, he often says that phrase, except it comes out, "Up, down, aclotch." Anyway, when we were at lunch in the zoo restaurant today, the rest of us were talking and I heard him saying/singing, "Up, down, aclotch" over and over. After a while I saw that he was looking at a bottle of water on the table that had a brand label, "Azur Water." I just about fell out of my chair when I realized he was pointing to the "A" and telling us the letter. 
 

As we were on our way toward the exit door, we passed through a section with grass and pathways where monkeys were just freely running all around us. A fun way to end our time there. 
 
We had one more notable stop on today's outing. On the way to the zoo, we had seen several big mounds of red dirt, about 8 feet high, along the road. Mark asked our driver, Joram, if they were piled there for construction purposes. Joram said, no, they were anthills. I asked him about 10 times if he was joking with us, and he said repeatedly that he was serious. So, on the way back home, we pulled over to the side of the road and got out to take some photos for perspective. 
 
Overall, today was a big improvement from yesterday. And, bedtime went off almost without a hitch. After we post this, we're going to try to end the night with a taste of normalcy for us – watching a new episode of 30 Rock or Modern Family that I downloaded before we left the U.S.  Smiles guaranteed.