ooooh yes... UC Davis IS an Ag. School

UC Davis puts on an event called Picnic Day which draws an average of 50,000 people. We have heard about this day since we first stepped foot in Davis in February. Our understanding is that this is UCD's P.R. day with alumni, parents, and the town. They do a very, very good job of it. Unfortunately, it poured rain today which kept many people away. But, we donned our foul-weather gear and went to campus. This picture shows the newly built Mondavi Center and the soon-to-be-built Food and Wine Center. The wine maker, Mondavi, donated $32M and Budweiser donated $10M to UCD. The Mondavi Center is the local place to see music - so far we have seen Gilberto Gil (Brasil) and the Sowetto Gospel Choir (South Africa). We are not sure what the exact intentions are for the Food and Wine Center, but it sure sounds enticing...

For a long time now, we have desired to milk a cow. Today was our chance. Here was our victim:

Milking was surprisingly easy - pinch with your thumb and forefinger, then squeeze with the middle, ring, and pinky (in this order), and presto - milk is squirted. This cow could not care less that hundreds of people were pulling on its teats attempting to milk it. . .

In addition to mammals, reptiles were exhibited in another building on campus. I was able to play with a cute lizard from Southern Asia. . .

Andrew particularly liked the exhibitions on invertebrates. Here, he is celebrating the entire cockroach species.
Here, we demonstrate the lifecycles of a fly.
A graduate student in entomology here at UCD has become a local celebrity with her maggot art. We have some bigger plans in store for maggot art - stay tuned...

The students provided some invertebrate costumes and we could not resist trying them on. . .
I think that Stef's may be a grasshopper - what am I?! AND, what is Andrew (above)???
We also were enlightened to the UC Davis heroes:
As a finale, we watched the Doxie Durby. Locals bring their Dachshunds which they have been training for the past year to race other weiners across a basketball court. As serious as the owners were, the dogs and the audience were not. Many Dachshunds got out of the chutes and turned around and ran into the audience to meet and greet the audience. Often the dogs just played with the others. And, every once-in-awhile, a Dachshund would run towards its owner across the court. As you can imagine, the audience (about 2000 of us) thought this was hysterical. [Between laughs, we wondered what alternate universe we had entered...]


for video click here