What about the ROUS's?

Rodents of Unusual Size?  I don't think they really exist.

Except in the Fire Swamp. And apparently the Buenos Aires Zoo.

These suckers are HUGE!  The pigeons in the forefront are not that small either, come to think of it.  We learned that these are the largest rodents in the world.  Whoa!  I wish I could say they were "cute" but all I could envision was one of them wrestling with the "Man in Black" and catching fire.  Ewww.

The rest of the Buenos Aires Zoo was pleasant enough.  We attended a show in which the sea lions understood Argentinian Spanish better than we did.

Bear's ankle was bothering her so we commandeered a wheelchair to whisk her around.  Of course, by the end of the day both girls were riding in it!

Towards the end of the day I wanted to take a break and read while J and the girls saw the remainder of the zoo.  My experience during this time proved that I don't have what it takes to be an honorary Argentinian.

I found a big open area with a multitude of shaded benches and sat on one.  (There was no one else anywhere around.).  After a while an older woman came and sat on a stump about 3 ft from me (even though there were about 300 stumps in the park/square, as well as 20 other benches, also in the shade.)  No problem, I continued to read.  Shortly thereafter, the woman's daughter came and sat down next to me on the bench to breast feed her baby.  No problem.  Next the breast feeding woman's 10 yr old daughter came and squeezed between her mom and me.  I moved over slightly so she could have some room.  Within a few minutes about 20 other people materialized and it was morphing into a full-on family reunion.  This was the point at which I collected my bag and walked over to one of the 20 other (still unoccupied) benches and resumed my reading.  Whatever.

And here we are at the end of the day, having fun in our mirrored elevator.  This didn't seem to ever get old.

This was also the elevator in which the girls banished a long-standing fear of elevators from some traumatic event when they were younger.  They were really "owning" it and riding it alone as often as possible, down to the lobby, or to the pool area where they managed to fit a swim in every day in between our excursions.