I can’t even compose myself enough to build up to a climactic ending so I am just going to throw it out there and then you can throw it right back: WE SAW ZEBRA TODAY. Now I’ll Tarantino this and go back to the beginning. Danny, Ellen and I decided to go hiking around Table Mountain near campus. First we walked up to the Cecil Rhodes Memorial, where there is a really pretty outlook with cobblestones set right into the mountain. All I could really think about was the time my dad hit a Rhodes Scholar on a bike and I saw it coming, so I pumped the imaginary brakes on the passenger side, which oddly enough didn’t stop the car…But that is neither here nor there. Anyways, Danny decided he wanted to climb the horse statue and ride it, but once I gave him a boost up there, he still couldn’t get on top of the horse. So the pictures are really just of him on the statue, now eyelevel with the horse’s butt. Which is exactly what Cecil Rhodes would have wanted. Our day of wildlife started off small with this fearless little bird at the memorial. At one point, it hopped onto my shoe. Not normal bird behavior. The three of us decided that it is our life mission to be bird whispers and we devoted a good half hour to taking care of it. Poured it water, talked to it, would have helped it out with a down payment on a house if it asked. Turns out this bird was a bit of a flight risk (pun intended) and after we poured our hearts out trying to help it, it just flew off to the next unsuspecting group of hikers. At this point we felt both betrayed and confused because it hadn’t flown literally this entire time and we had this elaborate hypothesis about how it was separated from its mother too early and hadn’t learned to fly—so naturally it had attached itself to us as a mother figure in some sort of bird imprinting. Yeah…not so much.
After exploring the memorial we hiked up a little farther and found a gate that looked like it separated us from another trail. In retrospect, this gate was probably meant to prevent us from entering—but again, that is neither here nor there because we entered anyways. We were admiring cloud formations and looked back towards the trail and realized there was a herd of zebra below us! We all started freaking out and wanted to get closer but didn’t want to provoke death by zebra. So Danny again starts talking to the one we presume to be “the leader.” Such a weird time and place to be living: we are standing 50 feet away from a herd of zebras while Danny is on his iPhone googling whether or not zebras are known to charge. With the help of Google, we decided it probably wasn’t a great idea to get any closer. As we were walking away, Ellen spotted a springbok in the trees!! Now if you don’t know what a springbok is, you’re probably not very intelligent. Kidding. None of us had any idea what a springbok was before yesterday. But when we found out, people here made it seem like we were downright slow for not knowing. Apparently it is the national animal of South Africa. It looks like a less intimidating deer. We also figured out that this is the animal on the side of our house telling us not to throw our cigarettes out the window! So apparently it is springboks and not deer that cry blood? Anyways, we saw one. All of this wildlife was a 40 minute hike from our house. Reminds me my formative years in San Jose…
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