Remember when I wrote about the Neumünster Zoo some months ago? Well, we visited the zoo again together with dear mother-in-law as I got a family year ticket from my brother for my birthday. I think I wrote at some point already shortly about some strange things mother-in-law is doing such as calling animals by the wrong name. I actually don’t know anymore when and in which post I wrote about it so here I give you now the complete insanity.

I know that there are always some animals where the average human doesn’t know the exact name or what the animal is exactly. My crazy Chinese mother-in-law is taking it to an entire different level. It all started with one of the first animals you see at the zoo in a big aquarium. When she saw the fishes swimming she was exclaiming something like “Oh, look at those sharks!”. Nope, it was just a bunch of sturgeon and they actually do look a bit like sharks so both my wife and I didn’t mind it. But then, it came, the disaster from which point onward we both listened very carefully what she called the different animals. We reached a big enclosure with a very big animal swimming around, MIL was like “Ohhh, look at that big sea-lion!”. My wife’s face was showing utter disbelief on what she just heard from her mother. The big animal swimming there and climbing out from time to time just to jump in again was nothing else than a damn big white furry polar bear!  How can she mistaken those two animals? I mean she even posed together with a sea lion a couple of years ago when we visited the Qinling Zoological Park!

Some animals she actually got right such as identifying birds as birds, monkeys as monkeys and the big pig as a big pig. But that was pretty much all she got right. Going around we saw according to her many different kinds of dogs, a huge variety of goats, the occasional tiger and more dogs. We actually also saw a seal which looks a bit similar to a sea-lion but no, for her it was a big fish. I wonder how someone can’t distinguish deers from goats, groundhogs from dogs and  lynx from tigers? The last amusement of the day was when we saw few ponys which she pointed at for Nathan and told him “Look, more goats”.

I offered already to give her as a birthday gift a children learning book about animals, perhaps she might get few more animals right at the next zoo visit. I hope Nathan won’t learn now any weird animal names thanks to his crazy Chinese Granny. It is just strange that she can’t recognize so many animals or just think that they are some goats, or dogs or whatnot. This whole thing is nearly as strange as a few weeks ago when there was a big rainbow in the sky and she was all excited as she has never seen any before in her life (even though even I saw few in China during my trips there…)

Do you have similar troubles as my Chinese mother-in-law when it comes to distinguish animals?

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