Wilhelma Zoo during Spring Break

For Spring Break, we made plans for the end of the week to visit my friend Kerstin.  If you don't know Kerstin, she is an amazing Gereman friend of mine who happened to come across my blog a little while before we even moved here.  When she heard we were moving to Germany, she was so helpful and has been since.  She lives in Stuttgart which is about 2 1/2 hours from our house so we don't see each other often but keep in touch quite a bit by email.  She has done so much more for us than we have for her.  We're still so grateful for her and her boyfriend, Christof.  They were amazing hosts to us and we had a really great time touring their city.

The first place we visited was the Wilhelmina Zoo.  The architecture was beautiful among the modern look of the flowers and animals. The history I learned was that it used to be private gardens of the Swabian King William I.  It was built in the Moorish architectural style which was popular among the royal and princely houses of Europe.

Cute girls!  Xanthe took most of the pictures on this visit.

I'm going to try to limit the animal pictures.  Know that there were some great animals. I'll post Spencer's and the girl's favorites

Penguins

Peacocks

Very large, red birds.  Not sure the names.

Cranes on the top of this building.

Seals

The fishes.  Xanthe caught some great shots. She has a really great "eye."  These are her reflection pictures.

These were really cool.

Spencer was pretty scared of this guy but still mesmerized. It was super warm in this heated area. 

"Dory"

Spencer and Kerstin.  He warmed up to her, no problem and wanted to be with her quite a bit.  It was really cute. She is a kid-person. I can't wait for her to have her own. She's going to be a great mom.

Xoe

I love these baby monkeys who wrap their tails around their moms as they walked around.

...or hung underneath them.

Umm, not sure about these but we were all enamored.  Mix between a zebra and something else.

These were by far Spencer's favorite. These and the elephants.

Xanthe did not want me take pictures of her so I made it worse by trying even harder to take a picture of her.

I guess at one point Harry Potter was more interesting. :) 

This fun course timed you as you took off and came back to see how fast you could go.

Brian was loving the tall trees.  It reminded him of home in Northern California.

Just plain beautiful.