Suddenly it was spring. And spring break. I went to Artis with three daughters, because that’s what columnists from Amsterdam do. I used to often find their observations annoying. Don’t they have anything better to do, I thought from a great distance. I now think about this in a much more nuanced way.
What was striking were the extremely long lines. Until the Resistance Museum across the street. An Artis employee walked along the lines and approached people to point out the option to buy tickets online. The mood among those waiting was, without exaggeration, ‘elated’. I carefully inquired what was there.
What was there?
The first beautiful day, so there is a good chance that ‘the elephants’ would be outside for the first time.
I had heard about it, but had forgotten: two elephants were born in Artis around Christmas. Not twins. Quite a strange story of an elephant who first became a mother and a few days later a grandmother. To quote a keeper in Artis who spoke to the mob with reinforcements: “We think that’s crazy, anything is possible with elephants.”
Just before that he honestly admitted that the birth of the animals gives his work an extra dimension. He knew everything about the group of elephants. A teenage boy had been taken away and taken to Emmen, he started having erections more and more often and was bothering his mother, but also his grandmother. Once again, with elephants, anything is possible. After decades of animal torment, the animal is the main focus in Artis, a heron now nests in the old lion enclosure, but that does not mean that people want to see everything. “But,” said the keeper, a man with Ray-Ban sunglasses and a well-groomed gray beard, “that was not decisive for us to transport him. The other elephants were tired of him, especially mother and grandmother.”
Everyone in the reptile enclosure was looking at us
Due to advancing insights, the elephant area is now so large that thousands of people can stand around it. Frida van Roosmalen (4) crawled forward through the people, I followed behind, apologizing, which made a gentleman in a wheelchair very angry because I had walked through his shot.
After half an hour with elephants we ended up via the giraffes in the reptile house, where hundreds of us searched for turtles, snakes and crocodiles. A man next to me was tickling his daughter on the neck with his fingers while shouting “tickle animal” very loudly in her ear. I imitated that joke a few minutes later, and I was publicly reprimanded.
“Are you seriously imitating my joke?”
Everyone in the reptile enclosure was looking at us, and Frida van Roosmalen didn’t like it at all. She wanted to call Eva to let off some steam. The eldest daughter (10) took me aside. “Really daddy, grow up.”
