The Lack Of A Sea Cow In One's Life

Yesterday I spent the day at the zoo with my grandparents.
This is not a flashback story from when I was a little child. I, 22-year-old BA-owning woman, went to the zoo with my father's parents yesterday. And I really enjoyed myself.
We started at 10:30 and stayed until 17:20. In between we saw everything animal-related in Artis zoo except the aquarium (I'm scared of it because it is so dark and it has fish in), the nocturnal animals house (my grandad thought it was nonsense) and the insectarium (none of us really wanted to see it, it was filled with little kids and my grandparents proclaimed it 'not that good anyway').
It was ridiculously busy in the zoo, it being a nice warm day in the summer holidays, so we almost continually got bumped into by small children and had to listen to their parents make stupid remarks. As my grandad said: 'You're more surprised by the people than the animals'.
The animals were amazing, but I honestly don't know why people go to the zoo with small children, because they do not appreciate it. I can remember when I was a child all I wanted to know was whether I would get an ice cream/hot chocolate (we had a year pass when I was a child so went in any type of weather), whether the lions were still there and whether we could go to the Sesame Street show in the Planetarium. This, yesterday proved to me, is still the main concern for children these days, except you have to replace lions with playgarden (no idea what the proper word in English is) and ice cream/hot chocolate with ice cream, chips, hamburger and a sugary drink of your choice.
My grandparents and I spent the whole day actually looking at all the animals for more than 1 second each, and we had a lovely time. A lot of the animals had had babies, so we saw lots of cute little animals (the baby Margay being the cutest as he looked like a kitten), and lots of awesome looking birds. For some reason I never really pay attention to the birds, but my grandad loves them and there were some really nice-looking ones, including some quite big black birds with very pretty curly feathers on their head, whose name I cannot remember.
The one big disappointment, however, was the lack of Sea Cow. There are about three animals I think every zoo should have: Lions (check), Tigers (only one and they'd amputated her tail but still: check) and Sea Cows. Sea Cows do nothing other than 'swim' in the water and eat Endive, but to me they are the coolest animal ever. In Artis they have this strange kind of aquarium next to the Gorillas and the Hippo for the Sea Cow (I know, it's an interesting combo). From one side you can go down a staircase to look into it, and on the other side you can go up a staircase to look from up top and watch them eat their Endive. I gleefully walked down the staircase to look at my swimming friend, and saw, instead, a fish. An UGLY fish. It turned out they haven't had Sea Cows in ages at Artis (I haven't been in about 5 years), and they have replaced them with fish! I am still appalled and do not know what to do.
How will I cope without knowing my friend the Sea Cow is happily eating Endive in Artis?
I will have to go to London Zoo and see if they have Sea Cows, and make them my friends. Let's just hope their aquarium isn't too posh or well-lit, and that they do nothing but eat Endive. Although, to be fair, not matter how nice the prospective Sea Cows may be, my life will never be the same. Some people may realise life will never be the same when their parents make their old room into a gym. Others may realise the same when their favourite candy is no longer for sale, or has a different name. Yet others may realise the finality of the past when they have to explain their favourite TV shows to younger cousins who look at them like they are crazy.
For me, the realisation that I can no longer dwell on the past and need to move on came when I realised I will never be able to see my lovely friend the Artis Sea Cow (real friends don't need to know each other's names) again.
Childhood is over: all that is left is the dreary path to death. Without a Sea Cow in my life, this seems almost impossible to stomach.