To be honest, visiting a zoo for exotic animals was not the first thing I thought of when I was planning a short visit to Austria, but here we are.
(Coati or Nasenbär, native to South America)
I was simply looking for a good place to stay overnight as we made our way back to Germany from Kärnten, and I stumbled on a few sights in Inntal, grazing the border of Austria and Germany.
That’s how we found ourselves crossing a huge farm field in the middle of a quiet town, to get to an inconspicuous cluster of trees (like a mini-forest) where you would never guess that an actual zoo was hiding. Why, hello, residents of Raritätenzoo Ebbs:
This map has a list of the current residents of the Ebbs Zoo. A few of the animals (namely, the lemurs and the macaws) were allowed to freely roam around the premises; they mainly kept to their climbing playground near the entrance.
Animals aside, I just realized that as adults, it’s more likely that we surround ourselves more and more only with things that are familiar to us. We start to think that we know most of what we need to know about the world, and then BOOM! We encounter something totally unknown to us, something almost alien, and it throws us off-balance for a bit — but in a good way, like discovering something new as a child once again. I start to think of how little I actually know about the world, even that space immediately around me: is there still a fruit native to our part of the world that I haven’t tried yet? What kinds of fish live in the lake where I usually take my kids? What’s in that little cubic centimeter of air that I just breathed in?
Another outing with our kiddos, another day of me ending up with new insight when I learn to see things from our kiddos’ eyes. We trooped back to our rental home across the border to Kiefersfelden, a quiet town which actually has a lot to offer for families with small kids. We still had time to burn on a very sunny day, so we took a leisurely 10-minute walk to Lake Kieferer See nearby for a small picnic lunch, and wow, was I happy that we hauled our lazy vacation bums to see these:
Cheers to new discoveries, and may we always find something new to make us smile.
.: ishcapades 