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Dense Nature

 The transition from the cold blue and foggy grey pick-up area to the vibrant and somewhat gaudy interiors of the bus hurt my eyes. After all the pupils of 6ChM and 6JSa had boarded the bus, it was now waiting for my English teacher, who was one of the coordinators of our zoo trip. I glanced at the designs on the inner roof of the bus. There were multicoloured cellos and shining trumpets, looking as if they were waiting ready to leap up and play a melody.

After I was bored at staring at the metal transport office with the peach coloured roof and the brown bench outside, I started a brief chat with my pals. In the heat of the conversation (which turned out to be not so brief), my teacher finally entered the vehicle. It was quite unusual as my English teacher was never late. It was as queer as a green flamingo writing the middle name of its sixth cousin (thrice removed) with the leg that it was balancing on.

This zoo trip was a trip to give us inspiration for writing poems, which was what our English topic was. We had been informed about a trip around a week before it took place. In class we had to vote for either going to the botanical gardens or the zoo. My class is full of animal lovers and majority of us voted to go to the zoo. We were to take notes about our surroundings in the zoo. These were to help us later when we were writing poems about the field trip.

The bus started immediately after my tutor belted up. The zoo was quite close by because the school was also in Jurong. However, the trip could only be two hours long because we left in the beginning of lunch, stayed there for the two periods of English and returned by the end of the afternoon break. We spent 40 minutes in the bus, so that left us only an hour and 20 minutes, in which time we also had to get to and fro from the places in the zoo. In the middle of the bus ride, a storm broke out, which we all knew would lead to the animals not coming out into the open if they didn’t like rain.

Just as we were about to enter the zoo, the rain stopped. In fact, the rain hadn’t reached here yet because the roads and flora were dry, although we could see the grey clouds in the distance. We strode over to the ticket counter, formed a straight line a few metres away from it and each gave the teachers five dollars for the ticket. My friend and I got tram tickets as he had a muscle problem because of which he couldn’t walk long distances. Because he wasn’t allowed to go alone (a school rule), I was requested to go with him. We hopped onto a tram with zebra stripes painted all over it and headed off for the fragile forest.

The fragile forest was a butterfly enclosure. The butterflies would just be fluttering in the air- living in an enclosed area wouldn’t make much of a difference to their life as the place was huge and the zoo keepers refilled their ‘feeding bowls’ (Five multicoloured hexagons with holes in them arranged in a circle on a white disc that is nailed to a tree.) and there were countless flowers. We made a partition in the chains that were hanging and opened the door that led to the butterfly park.

There was only one colour around me- green. Everything from the butterfly net to the moss growing on the emerald trees was jade green. Name a shade and it was there- pear, olive, lime, Persian green, army green, shamrock green, pine green, bottle green, sea green, racing green, midnight green, teal green, camouflage green, kelly green, pigment green, tea green, electric green, moss green, office green, hunter green, fern green, myrtle, spring green, spring bud, viridian and even asparagus!

The first thing that greeted my ears was a bunch of loud peacocks and peahens hopping like they needed to use the toilet but the thing that was using the lavatory was taking its time. Hanging upside down from the tree next to me was a bat. Its sinewy wings looked like the fabric batman’s wings were made of. A fresh breeze hung in the air. I walked a few steps ahead and I was soon on a wood bridge, as brown as the three primary colours mixed together.

There were calm waterfalls and tranquil water flowed elegantly under us. Unruffled lotuses bloomed in the cool pool like a magicians hands hypnotizing someone. The peaceful moments were broken by two screams. One of them came from a girl near a cluster of bats. She had screamed in surprise because the bats had just urinated. The other one came from one of my classmates because she had dropped her homework diary in the pond. We all walked towards the place where she dropped it to see if it could be retrieved. We could see it, floating on top of the water but it was out of reach and it was drenched in water. There was anyway not much point recovering it as the water would have made the ink spread out all over the page (chromatography- the process of separating different liquids in a solution). I then walked towards the bats and took a couple of snapshots so that I could write a poem about it later.

We lined up again and marched over to the orang-utan point. My friend and a supervisor had already left because he could then rest on the way and they will still reach there before us. It had started drizzling and soon it was heavily raining. I praised myself for remembering to pack and umbrella. After all, this was Singapore- you could never predict when it would rain. The problem was that the monkeys had all gone indoors as they disliked the rain. We only had half and hour left so instead of waiting for the monkeys and getting as fed up and bored as a spoilt five year old being forced to look at mouldy custard dripping down a wall, we headed back to the bus, stopping for a couple of minutes in the otter’s pond. Anyways, we could see their living conditions later by peeping in our locker room.

I could hear the otters before I could see them. Otters are minute mammals that eat fish. They are as furry as stereotypical teddy bears. I didn’t find them too interesting as most of them just sat in the corner under a tree and we could barely make out their outline even after craning our necks as much as owls. I could only see the head of one of them that was sleeping inside a hollow log.

We reached school a few minutes late for our next lesson, but otherwise, we followed the schedule. The trip was enjoyable and amusing because all my friends were with me and we had a great time. Even though I had been to the zoo numerous times, I never had this much entertainment. Also, I noticed many more things in this trip because I was looking for small details to write some poetry about. This was a fantastic trip and I think that it was a great idea to choose the zoo for inspiration.

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Aditya K