Dreams do come true!

Giant otters ARE just like ordinary otters. But much bigger!

And contrary to the ordinary inverse law between size and cuteness, giant otters are actually MUCH CUTER than standard otters. Or at least as cute...no offence to mini otters.

Went to the sciencey research gardens today. Didnt get to play in the sciency research areas- but we did get to watch the otters!

And manatees! Manatees are big! And funny looking! (it´s detailed descriptions like this that make up for the fact I haven´t managed to upload any photos...right?).

Big alligators! And medium sized alligators! both kind of terrifying with their large teeth and dead dead eyes.

Also a couple of wee Rodents Of Unusual Size. They are like big hamster/mouse crossbreeds that also fail to observe the inverse law of cuteness. Maybe it ist a law. Maybe it is more of a rule of thumb?

Bucketed down again today. So much so that everything I was wearing (including shoes and underclothes) got saturated. And more so when some knob in a taxi decided to splash us as we were walking to the bus stop.

I´ve come to the conclusion that cab drivers in Manaus are all complete [insert pretty bad word here]s. So far there has been the splashy guy, the guy who wanted to charge us $R15 for what ended up being about a 15 min walk, the guys who also tried to rip us off while we waited for the bus this morning (to be fair, we did wait a number of hours...and they knew it...), and the crowning glory being the bored cab driver (during the same wait-for-bus) stealing a homeless, and quite probably out of it, guy´s shoes one by one (putting one in a rubbish bin and just throwing the other as far as he could). He topped this awesome trick off my sneaking up on the same guy, slapping him in the face, and running away. Good times.

and...that´s my story...