We decided to forego the rolls this morning for a breakfast of bread and jam with Imke, and then took the bus for a visit to the Osnabrueck zoo (about a 40-minute ride). I had been there many times before both with the kids and also when I myself was a kid, so I thought for sure Mark and I had gone before, but we had not and it was actually all new to him. The zoo is really nice–it has been expanded in recent years and has a big safari style exhibit and a lot of really good viewing areas. Since it had gotten cooler today (cloudy and in the mid-70s; very nice), the animals were actually very active, and although it was a bit muddy from the heavy rainfall in the last few days, we really enjoyed ourselves. We didn’t get to all the exhibits because we ran out of time (we had to leave by 1:30), but we took our time watching the expansive wolf exhibit, a very cute and rather new baby baboon who was trying to learn to climb a rock, and a few other animals that got rather close up, like a very crabby snowy owl, and a tiger that slept, belly-up, against the observation window. We rather liked the “sandcat” that we’d never seen before, and some other animals that are not in the Omaha zoo, like porcupines. We then took the bus to the main station (about a 20-minute ride) to have a quick bite to eat and then to meet up with Sarah, a student from nearby Muenster who will be attending Hastings College next fall, and who met with me to ask some logistics questions. We walked from the train station to a downtown cafe, and she and I sat and talked while Mark wandered off for a while and came back around 4 pm. We walked Sarah back to the station, and took a bus most of the way home because Imke wanted some help getting her lawn clippings to a composting station. We hung out at home until dinner time, and then Kai came with us again on our walk; this time, we walked to the nearby cemetery to show him, too, where Hermann’s urn is buried under a tree in a forested part of the cemetery. He thought it was a really beautiful spot, too. We puttered around at home a little more, and went to bed around 11.