It had to be the love at first sight…. I was totally floored…all goo goo eyed and gone bonkers over the sight of the beings in majestic black tail coats…..the absolutely adorable penguins!

Today as I visited the Al Ain Zoo I got lucky enough to stumble upon the display of penguins in the bird house. These penguins are kept in quite a large glass room created to imitate their natural habitat of Antarctica complete with clear water and rocks jutting out to create a beach side area, as well as the corals scattered about the ground to give it that special flavor of authenticity. The walls were painted to create a smattering of the evergreens to reflect whatever little fauna there is during the time the thaw sets in, in the poles…..and totally making the scene picture perfect were the dozen or so little penguins, tottering about.

Their black coats were brilliantly shiny and since they kept on coming in and out of the water, their hair or was it fur or scales? Were slicked back on their tiny heads making it look as if they had just gelled them back to make themselves fit for a soiree. They went pit pat on their webbed feet, picking up a pebble from the ground in their beaks and then stepping down into water and cutting through it with such deftness and so swiftly as if some motor boat’s submersible blackish white blade was sluicing through the aquamarine waves.

We had a good 20 to 25 minutes with the dwellers of the frozen world, photographing them, tapping on their glass windows and simply standing and staring at them. I was exultant because I had always wanted to see the little black tail coated creatures in reality, other than in the reality shows only and to top it off was the visage of scores of pink flamingoes standing flocked together at the far end of a narrow strip of a water channel at the exit from the zoo. I wish I could transfer the pictures from my movie camera but that’s such a lot of work…( at 1:30 am in the morning I turn into the biggest couch potato in the world )

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So besides the horses that I soooooooooo badly want to own (Horses have to be the one of Allah mian’s most graceful creations) I would really love to have penguins too….only if someone else would look after them and I could go and hug them every once in a while