| Aug. 1st, 2009 @ 10:30 pm Gay elephant - a marketing trick? |
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Having my sister over to visit for a long weekend I found it difficult to come up with activities that would allow us to spend quality time together and at the same time take advantage of the gorgeous Polish summer.
Remembering the media from a couple of months ago, when the city of Poznan and what I believe was the mayor made announcement about the very disappointing gay elephant they had purchased for the New Poznan Zoo - we had to go check this out. We're not sure if the Polish are just extremely catholic and conservative (still) or if this poor elephant is the victim of a marketing ploy.
Not proving particularly easy to visit this Zoo as a non-Polish speaking foreigner, their web page was only to be found in Polish (not what you'd call very tourist friendly) and the walk from the tram stop wasn't as such clearly marked with signs such as "Yes, you're still on the right way, it just takes for freaking ever to walk there and we didn't bother putting up a side walk for you losers without cars" type of thing.
Finally we arrived at the zoo, purchased our tickets and went to check out the overview. The elephant area was clearly marked with a route and picture (yay). Starting to walk towards the area where they keep the elephants we discovered how the Zoo has invested in elephant shaped signs every 500 meters, telling us how far we still had to walk to see the alleged gay elephant. OK, the signs didn't say they thought he was gay but still. First sign at 1500 meters, this was about to become a long day but at least we would pass other animals on the way.
After walking about half a kilometer and seeing nothing but a bird in a cage and a misplaced coca-cola vending machine we came across this parade of plastic elephants in various colours. Had to take a picture, and why not, it's not like there was anything else interesting to photograph. My sister and a plastic elephant had to volunteer posing.
We saw a couple of bored zebras being fed next to the fence and we kept on walking. After another 500 meters and several empty looking cages (to be fair, something was moving in a bush once) we arrived at the tigers. There was this large wooden building with pictures of tigers on the outside, this had to be good. Stepping inside we saw nothing, but the top floor was probably built as a look out point so we climbed up there. Still nothing. Oh wait, there, in the far distance we saw half a tiger lying behind a tree. No point even trying to catch that on my iPhone, could possibly get the tree on there but no chance in catching that little dot in the horizon. Sigh, we kept on walking toward our goal.
After what felt like a long while but many interesting sister gossip stories later, we arrived at this enormous building. The long walk had to have been worth it, this looked like an Opera house, very impressive!
We're both really excited, now we will finally see for ourselves the gay elephant fraternizing with the other male elephants instead of showing interest in the females! There are no elephants outside so we walk inside, crossing the bridge like entrance of the elephant house. We walk up toward the edge and the open space to see...
...a sad looking concrete area, with the pool part drained and locked off with an electric fence. One swaying trunk of what we believe to be a small female elephant, barricaded up in a corner a couple of meters wide and long. The alleged gay elephant patrolling outside this fenced off area, looking rather unhappy. Wow, what a disappointment.
There's no guide talking to people about what is going on, no signs to tell us about the clever scheme to get the male interested in the female by keeping her separated from him. Nothing really, we still don't know what was going on, we just know it looked really sad, hoping that there was a grand plan behind it all.
Having seen the elephant and the trunk of the second elephant we realized we had to walk back as well, now it really started to feel like a chore.
All in all the visit to the "new" zoo was just about worth a good story. I would absolutely not recommend it to anyone who's not a huge fan of walking a very long distance on a poorly asphalted road, seeing almost nothing and with a very limited choice of ice creams.
If you do decide to go, make sure the sun is shining, that you're wearing your good walking shoes, that you bring your own drinks and snacks, bring good company for entertainment and don't expect to see many animals.
My conclusion is the statements about the gay elephant could not have been a marketing trick. If it was they would have known to charge for viewing it (entrance fee to this zoo is only 11 PLN per adult, just under 3 USD or 4 EUR). They could have sold souvenirs and toys for the kids or elephant shaped candy right next to it, offered taking professional pictures of your children on a plastic elephant, had a web page available in a couple more languages to attract tourists. Something!
By the time we got back out to the main gate again we had little energy to look at any souvenirs or buy balloons, we just wanted to get out of there and fast - and so we did! |
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