My visit to the petting zoo and my first actual zoo. Given that the decade passed just as I gained full sentience, I have a fairly hazy recall of the 90s. Vague memories and somewhat surrealist settings that might not be true... But one thing I do remember clear as day is our first family trip to the States in '99. Ever since my school (i.e. kinder) had the Big Red Barn for story time, my parents knew I was developing a fascination for animals. So on this trip, they brought us to a petting zoo where I saw and fed all the animals I remembered from the book. That was already a fun time, but then they took it a step further. They took things to the wild side. I had never been to a zoo before, so when they brought me to the Smithsonian National Zoo in DC, it was nirvana. I'm pretty aware my mind made a lot of it out to look bigger and grander than it actually was, but it is a definitive core memory. I've been an animal lover ever since, I always go to the zoo in whatever place we travel, and just recently, I went on my first field research mission in Tanzania. My personality and my life's goals are defined by this stuff, and I can readily trace it back to that first memory of seeing animals up-close.