The Addis Ababa zoo
===================

Kiriakou introduces the story as a way of filling time. He was in Addis Ababa with half a day and nothing to do, so he went to the zoo. 

What he saw

There were, in his account, three or four zoo workers pulling and pushing a screaming donkey into the lions' cage. The animal was "doing everything it can to fight being pushed into the lion's cage."  The lions then tore it to pieces. 

Kiriakou's own verdict is brief and unhedged: "It was bad." He does not soften it, and when his co-host twice volunteered that he would have wanted to watch, Kiriakou did not join him. 

The context in which the story arises is a Danish zoo's public appeal for unwanted pets to feed to its predators, which Kiriakou and Rall had been discussing with a mixture of horror and amusement. Kiriakou offers Addis Ababa as the harder version of the same thing, not a policy announcement but something he stood and watched. 

The admission price

The detail Kiriakou adds without prompting concerns the gate. "They gouge you if you're a Westerner," he says: roughly a nickel to get in as an Ethiopian, and about a dollar if you are not. 

Foreign zoos generally

Asked whether zoos elsewhere are like this, Kiriakou agrees that the ones in Central Asia and comparable places are rough and "not up to the high standards", a judgement his co-host immediately relativised by pointing out that the Central Park Zoo in New York used to be awful too. Kiriakou's reply was a single word of agreement. 

The episode is one of a small set of unglamorous travel recollections Kiriakou offers from his overseas career, told without a lesson attached.

See also

- The best meal overseas
- Qat in Yemen
- The bowl of dates
