Yesterday was the first Wednesday of the week, so I went to the SF zoo, which has free entry for SF residents on that day. It was kind of impromptu, I just found out about it the night before when I was sleepily surfing for cheap or free stuff to do around the bay area. Just have to bring anything with your address on it, like a bill, and a photo ID to confirm your name is right. I managed to walk there, since it's not that far from where I live. 1 hour's walk, which I counted as a replacement for my jog around the lake, with the cool weather and listening to my iPod, it wasn't that bad.

Early in the morning, some animals still asleep.
One of my favourite parts of the zoo was the petting zoo/small farm which had some more uncommon breeds of domestic animals, which you can go up to and touch, or buy some food to feed them.
Since it was free day, there were many school groups at the zoo too, so lots and lots of children running around and making lots of noise. Luckily since they are shorter, you can kind of wade through the crowd. But I felt sorry for the animals, at one point, a group of kids decided to start screaming in unison. Some enclosures had signs saying to be quiet, but most kids and even the adults are too excited to notice.
The goats' eyes were kind of weird, their pupils are like rectangles, not circles.
The zoo also has a volunteer program where kids can become members and help to showcase animals to the visitors, like sitting in the open with some (domestic) animals and letting the visitors touch the animals, and tell them some info.
An alpaca with a uber-posh hairstyle.

Some of the bigger enclosures.


They had a part of the zoo with sick and injured animals adopted by the zoo. This one has only 1 wing after being involved in a car accident.

Usually I wouldn't visit a zoo if it involved spending any money there. I'm still not sure if I'm for or against zoos, I guess it depends on which zoo it is. Some of them do have breeding programs for endangered animals, but then again how they got some of the animals in the first place is kind of dodgy, and might be causing the animal populations to become endangered in the first place. I was also wondering how the zoo(and many other tourist attractions) can manage to financially have free days. Seeing the crowd, the shops and cafes in the zoo were making very good business, for one, as well as things like sales of food for the petting zoo, rides on the kiddy train,etc. And the high taxes in SF as well, which is why residents have so many free and discounted benefits.