ZOO TYCOONS—
Writers Addie Lawrence and Elaine Best have set out to explore the world outside of the Wofford bubble, hoping to find gems and adventures in the supposedly miserable Spartanburg. They hope to be the renegades of a new movement, that students will pop this bubble and explore what Spartanburg and the areas surrounding Wofford have to offer.
Greenville Zoo
Where: 150 Cleveland Park Drive, Greenville, SC, 29601
Price: $8.75 for adults and $5.50 for children with discounts for groups of 16 people or more
What it is: A quaint little zoo with a variety of animals for you to see and enjoy. Be sure to see if the zoo is having any special events.
Our thoughts:
A: At first we were going to the Spartanburg Zoo, Hollywild, but our lawyers suggested otherwise after a rumored lemur escape and something about buses.
E: So instead, we decided to hit up the Greenville Zoo. It wasn’t crowded at all, but that may have been because it was about 40 degrees outside.
A: To escape from the cold, we walked into the reptile house, which held an assortment of odd creatures from spawn-of-satan hissing cockroaches to fuzzy tarantulas. The snakes were actually pretty adorable because they were slithering towards the doors in their cages for food. We tried to communicate with them via Parseltongue, but I guess they spoke a different dialect.
E: After we left the supposed “cute” tarantulas according to my co-writer, we began to hear loud yelling noises that sometimes sounded like a child screaming. At first we thought it was just a group of kids being rowdy, but then it sounded more violent. Were the children being eaten? Was someone in danger? We decided at that point, however, the baby giraffe was a lot cuter than dealing with the potentially mutilated corpses of our fellow zoo goers, and that he was more important than a potential loose, wild animal.
A: But after a while of watching the adult giraffes awkwardly proposition one another (apparently they hit each other with their heads to show affection and drink urine to test for ovulation), we discovered that the source of the screaming was a couple of gibbons. As soon as we approached, they stopped flipping Shih Tzus and instead lounged about like a married couple for awhile, eating leaves on the ground despite the actual food in their bucket. We turned around to look for some other monkey-like things –
E: But then the world stopped when Addie got to see her red pandas.
A: They’re adorable raccoon foxes that sleep and climb on things! I’m still hyperventilating. I took at least 30 pictures. One of them made eye contact with me. It was glorious.
E: We actually left to move on to another exhibit and realized Addie wasn’t with us because she was still drooling over her precious red pandas. At one point, we all tried to climb on a bear statue (a normal thing for children to do, apparently not so normal for twenty-somethings). The climb was a struggle–it was the second time we had faced death that day.
A: But we survived!
Ratings:
A: The Greenville Zoo gets ALL the points, mostly for the red pandas, the snakes and the screaming-but-suddenly-chill gibbons.
E: I give the Greenville Zoo four fluffy chickens, which also happens to be the amount of my dowry, for being a cute zoo but also making me think a group of children were being massacred by monkeys.
Moral of the story:
A: It’s possible to call a cage around some squirrels an “exhibit” these days. Don’t question it, just move along.
E: Dubbing an animal’s actions in a zoo is something everyone should try in their lives. Petting zoos are actually buffets for goats. Zoo gift shops are magical places.
— Addie Lawrence and Elaine Best
