Odd Experiences

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I was slapped by a gibbon.

Now there’s a really cool story here so… bear with me. (Bear in mind though that the story is really probably just coincidence, but it makes for neat retelling.)

February of 2003, I go to the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa. One of the exhibits we stopped by was the gibbon exhibit. Two gibbons inside, one male, one female. The male gibbon was hanging from the fence, just kinda gazing at me, swinging around rather coolly, when the female gibbon came up and planted a big smooch on his face. The male pusher her away (looking very much like “Hey, don’t kiss me in front of the lady”) and the female started screeching at ME like a banshee. My fault her man is a womanizer? I don’t think so!

February of 2004. Back to South Africa, back to zoo, back to the gibbons. Same two gibbons, hanging around lackadaisically. I stand near the railing, thinking to myself how cool it is that it’s the same two animals from the year before, when suddenly, this long gibbon arm reaches out and WHACKS me upside the head. It didn’t hurt, but damn was I shocked. The female gibbon had slapped me and run into her enclosure, which had a glass viewing window on the other side. Stunned, (and laughing) my husband and I go over to the viewing window, and she’s sitting on a branch, glaring at us through the glass when she suddenly LAUNCHES herself at the glass directly in front of my face. She hit the glass so hard she left gibbon-prints on the glass, and was sitting on the ground, looking dazed but pissed. We quickly left the exhibit.

I swear, that animal remembered me from the year before and was exacting her revenge for her man making goo-goo eyes at me.

22

This one happened on the campus of UCSB on a warm, sunny California day. Behind the student union is a grassy hill that slopes down to the lagoon. There were a group of college students lazing around in the sun, eating and talking. A little ways down the hill, a gopher pops up out of his burrow, looking for all the world like the puppet-gopher in CaddyShack. The gopher sat there watching all of us students, but failed to notice… directly behind him stood a Great Blue Heron. Now, this is one large, nasty sumbitch bird with a long snake-like neck and a viscious, sharp bill. The heron shoots it’s head out and down, grabbing the gopher by the scruff on the neck. He lifts the gopher up and carries the squirming prey down to the edge of the lagoon, where he promptly dunks the gopher under the water and holds it there. After a minute, the heron lifts the gopher up and sees that it is still moving, so… back into the water with it. Another minute passes and the gopher is now dead. The heron flips the gopher up into the air, extends his neck, grabs the gopher out of the air and swallows him in one gulp. We watched as the large lump slid slowly down the length of the long neck until it disappeared. It was then that we all spontaneously broke into cheers and scared the bird away. Enjoy your Wild America!

23

Gophering, gophering, gone!

Speaking of Stonehenge, way back in October 1971 I took my first trip abroad, to England. One of my stops was Salisbury, to see the cathedral and Stonehenge. There are also Roman ruins about midway between the two. I took a local bus out to the ruins and poked about for a while, then decided to walk to Stonehenge.

I walked along beside the road through the hilly woods where the ruins were. Cresting a last rise, I emerged from the trees and saw before me Salisbury Plain. Save for the motorway crossing it, it seemed little changed from Bronze Age times.

But where was Stonehenge? There – faintly seen, a mere dusting of grayness on the green of the plain. As I walked on, little by little, it grew in size and definition until at last I stood before the great arch itself.

This was in the days before the monument was fenced off, and one could still stroll among the stones themselves. It was awe-inspiring, to experience Stonehenge much as its ancient builders might have.

I did, however, take the bus back to Salisbury. :wink:

24

While “between jobs” in the early 1990’s, I was driving my truck to Phoenix (job there, I hoped). Right in the middle of I-10 (I think I was near Benson AZ, not sure) I see a large black animal in the road. As I get closer (I slowed down) I see it is…

A big Black panther; Crossing I-10.; And staring at me. It stood on the shoulder and watched me drive by.

(Swerved all over the road trying to fetch my camera. Got only one blurry shot.)

25

I had to give my son’s 5 foot Boa constrictor an enema…TWICE :eek:

26

Good grief, you win!!

27

When I was a young teenager, I found a small square of green notepaper, bearing the neatly written words Roxell Roxell Bowshot. I have never worked out why anyone would write that down.

28

Well, not really odd but I suppose it qualifies as an out of the way experience…

A couple years back I got to go on a job shadow of a Paleontologist. I forget which time he was interested in though (Pleisecene (sp?) maybe?) but he took me around the back areas of the Provincial Museum of Alberta. I got to see all sorts of things they had tucked away, among them being some ivory tusks and a mammoth tooth. I got to hold the tooth which was the coolest thing to me. Here is a link to the tooth. It’s one of those 3D things.

29

Once I was watching an amateur inline hockey game at our local rink. I got distracted by something and when I looked back, one of the players (probably twelve or thirteen years old) was hopping around on one limb. I didn’t know why, until…

“Is that a leg?”

The kid’s prosthetic leg had fallen off in the middle of the game. Just think - what would you do if you were officiating that day?

I was staying at a hotel (I don’t remember where, but oddly I was there for a hockey tournament). You know the drawers hotels always have? The ones containing one (1) Bible? Well. My drawer was different. Mine had a Bible and a drawing of Spongebob Squarepants (done, by all appearances, by a little kid). It really made my day. I still have that picture. I wanted to draw a different Spongebob and leave it at the hotel when I left, but that fell through.

Not really odd, but a cool experience nonetheless: I was on a school-sponsored mission trip to Saltillo, Mexico, last Christmas. The complex in which we stayed was on a hill off to one side of Saltillo proper, so we had a great view of the city. One evening we had one of the most astonishing sunsets I’ve ever seen. The sky literally looked like liquid fire. It was amazing. I took a picture of it, and it looks reversed - the sky somehow looks like a road of molten lava. Just awesome.

And speaking of Saltillo…one day our group took a trip into the city (until then we had been going to towns and churches in the surrounding area). We toured the city’s basilica, which is a big, neato church. Lots of paintings and statues, as you’d expect. We even got to walk around on the roof, which was also cool.

But the amazing thing. We had a guide take us into an upper room which overlooked a courtyard and some streets. He closed the wooden shutters over the only window in the room. The shutters had a small hole in them.

The room was plunged into darkness. The walls gradually seemed to get lighter, and we could see shadows moving around on them, as you’d expect. But these shadows weren’t coming from people in the room. They were coming from outside, through the hole in the shutters. Still, nothing extraordinary, right?

But the shadows grew more defined. Eventually we could see outlines of cars and buildings on the basilica walls. Then we began to see details of the scene outside the building. And the most astonishing thing?

The image on the walls was in color. :eek:

It was as if a movie projector was casting a film onto the walls of the church through that tiny hole in the shutters. It was that clear. We watched cars, people walking down the street…in living color. I don’t know how this happened, but it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.

30

#1 A few years ago, my dad worked at Blaze AFB in Columbus, Mississippi where they train AF pilots. One of the women who worked in his office was married to a guy in training and he got me into the training center where I was able to “fly” one of the flight simulators they use to train the pilots before actually taking them up.

#2 A few years before that, I was returning from visiting my dad in Germany and I was on a little commuter flight from Dulles to Harrisburg Int’l. It was just me and a family that was apparently returning from a ski trip. A woman who was with them asked me where I was from and I said “Chambersburg”. She said “Oh, are you in school?” I said that indeed I was - 8th grade. She then asked me if I knew of a teacher named “Mrs. B”. I was a little startled by this and said that yes, she was my 7th grade English teacher. It turns out that the family was related to B’s family and the woman I was talking to was her cousin. Small world, indeed.

31

Three kind-of similar stories:

During one trip through Europe doing the backpacking thing on my own, I went to Salisbury, England for a couple of days. While at the cathedral there, I saw that there was a choir visiting from the States who were performing that evening–from the church whose choir I rang handbells with at home! I went back for the performance that night just so that I could confirm the coincidence and say hi to them.

During another backpacking excursion through Wales, I did a little castle tour thing on my own, starting at Conwy in the north, and ending up in Cardiff in the south, staying at youth hostels and taking coaches or hiking in from one point to the next. I ran into a brother-sister couple from London who were doing essentially the same tour, but who were about one day ahead of me. We would run into each other in hostels every other night or so, and got to know each other pretty well. However, every single day of their tour, they had rain the entire day. My tour was mostly sunny, except for the one day that I spent touring a castle with them. I last saw them as I was riding the coach to Cardiff. They got on the same coach I was one in a relatively rural spot, and told me that they had run out of dry clothes. They were tired of being wet, so they were giving up and heading back to London. None of us could understand how they had rain every day, while I had sunshine every day, within just a few miles of each other.

Finally, although not quite the same subject, on another backpacking trip through England (this time with DH). We had been visiting Salisbury, and DH bought an LP (remember them?) that he had been looking for for years at a flea market there. That night, when we packed our backpacks to leave Salisbury the next day, we realized that the backpacks weren’t wide enough to safely pack the LP without bending it. DH had a brilliant idea of getting a pizza box to carry it in, so he hopped down to the Pizza Hut on the corner and asked for an empty box. The next day, we set off for Stonehedge with the Pizza Hut box strapped to the outside of my backpack. We have a photo around here somewhere of me walking up the hill to Stonehedge (with the stones in the background) with a Pizza Hut box strapped to my back. We joked about sending it to Pizza Hut, but never did…

32

When I was in 10th grade, a friend and I put our names and addresses on a couple of dollar bills and spent them. Six months later, I got a letter in the mail with my dollar enclosed. A man in Virginia got my dollar as change when he was out on the road and it found its way to his wife. She wrote me a short letter and I wrote her back thanking her for sending the dollar back. We wrote back and forth for six years before we gradually lost touch with each other. Pretty neat way to aquire a penpal.

And now for a pretty weird coincidence. About 15 years ago on a cross-country family trip, we were stopped in Colorado because of an accident on the interstate. We were stuck there for about an hour and my dad noticed a car in front of us bearing South Carolina tags. When he realized we weren’t moving for a while, my dad got out of the car and went up and knocked on the window of the car in front of us. Turns out that not only was the person from SC, he was also from the same area and had gone to the same high school my dad had gone to.

33

Last night, I went to the shoppette to get a snack. I got a Lunchables pack and a bag of Reese’s Bites.

I get home, and my bag contains:

A Lunchables pack
A bag of York Peppermint bites

Freaked me out. Didn’t help that I got Silent Hill 4: The Room yesterday, either.

34

In 1966 I was with the 561st MP Company at Fort Myer, Virginia. I used to guard President Kennedy’s gravesite on the midnight shift. Just me and the Prez… eerie but awesome!

35

I have one somewhat like the coffee lady story…

This was when my parents and I lived in San Diego. We were at a Burger King in Fresno on the way back home from Yosemite, and I ordered my food, got my drink cup and walked off…without paying. The idea that I had to pay for my meal before I could fill up my drink and walk off had totally slipped my mind. The girl behind the counter said “Excuse me, you have to pay for this. Hello? Are you going to pay for that?” Finally I realized she was talking to me, came back to the counter and profusely apologized and paid. I was so embarrassed, but I remember my mother saying “well, at least you probably won’t have to see her again” [and relive the experience].

A couple months later, we were at a Padres baseball game back in San Diego. I go to the concession stands to get a hot dog and who do I see? The Fresno Burger King girl. Our eyes met and we exchanged looks of horror, and I walked off to buy a hot dog somewhere else.

36

If you google on “camera obscura” you should get a pretty good explanation. We went to a similar demonstration recently in a local park, but they just used a big, curtained box. Your experience sounds cooler, literally and figuratively.

37

Once I was wearing bright red pants and a little kid (about 2 years old) walked up to me and licked my pants. His mother was horrified but I guess they looked delicious.

38

Years ago I was in Mexico with some friends and driving by we saw what appeared to be a really nice whorehouse. There were all sorts of beautiful women around and some guys trying to hit on them. We decided to go in out of curiosity and ran into another group of Americans there that had also been curious. I got kinda alarmed though when one of them said they’d been told they were going to have to pay some large amout to leave or else they would be beaten up. The guy telling me this seemed very scared. I wasn’t having any of that, rounded up my friends and walked out. At the gate I asked one of the girls what was going on there. Apparently it had been a language /translation problem, no one was in any danger and it wasn’t a whorehouse but a Quinceanera for some girl.

39

EddyTeddyFreddy - I helped when my vet castrated Irish, too. I held his back leg up. About a month ago I was at my small animal vet with a sick dog. The vet is busy - she’s had a boxer come in for an emergency cesaerean. They have puppies coming out the wazoo (if the wazoo is a hole in the abdomen) so I ask if they need any help. I spent the next half hour helping to resuscitate puppies. The boxer ended up having 14 pups, with two being born dead (blocking the birth canal, hence the emergency C-section).

StG

40

Another wild and weird experience. I was with a small group of people for a float trip down a river in Alaska. We loaded our gear and started to climb into a large prop plane (an “Otter” IIRC). The pilot walks up and looks like Donald Sutherland, unshaven and in a ratty old brown bombers jacket. He pops on an old WWII vintage leather pilots helmet with the large goggles and we take off. I was sitting in the seat next to him with a full view out the windows ahead. As we approach a pass across the Brooks Range he says, “See them elk down there?” I look ahead and see a herd of elk in the pass. “Yeah”, I say. “Watch this!” he yells and puts the plane into a wild dive, throttle wide open, straight at the herd. He pulls up a few yards above the herd and scatters them in all directions, all the while screaming like a banshee! I must have been pale as a ghost! Needless to say, I was very glad to get on the ground again.