I fell in love with otters as soon as I first set eyes on them. They were the sea incarnate: the tangible manifestation of my favorite element, water. I imagined that when otters died, they merely returned to the swell of water that bore them. It was no shock to me that in my favorite book series, Harry Potter, my favorite character's patronus is an otter. When I took a Buzzfeed-style online quiz, so was mine. (Shout out to the t-shirt I bought at the Newport Aquarium emblazoned with a cartoon otter wearing round glasses and a scarf and the words, "Harry Otter.")

The next time I saw an otter, it was in the wild while on a camping trip with my mom's family. A brief and transient experience, the otter merely slid into the water of some Kentucky river. I caught a flash of tail and the impression of a flat brown head before the noise of my family's fishing activities scared it away. I squinted at the muddy water, but otters can hold their breath for an impressive length of time and have evolved to blend seamlessly with the current until they can slide undetected into a covered shelter along the bank. It was long gone.

Through the years, I visited Newport Aquarium frequently, and I searched for wild otters in every creek and river, never catching a glimpse of them.

Then, in March of last year, my boyfriend and I decided to go to Dortmund, Germany, during my Spring Break while at Oxford to see his favorite soccer/football team in person. While researching what we could do in the city while not touring the Westfalenstadion or eating expensive schnitzel, I discovered something that set my heart ablaze: the Dortmund Zoo. On the welcome website, in big, bold letters, were the words "Otter House." The Dortmund Zoo boasts the world's largest population of Giant Otters outside South America, one of the rarest animals in the world. I was more excited to go to the zoo than seeing the Eiffel Tower (granted, I'd already seen it) or visiting the Cologne Cathedral.

We walked an hour and a half across German highways and through residential areas to reach the zoo. My boyfriend, with a passable knowledge of German, bought a ticket for €4, and I accidentally snuck in without paying because I thought he had bought both of our tickets. The zoo was exotic and mesmerizing. We ate bratwurst and chips/fries for lunch, the food warming our frostbitten fingers. All around us were families enjoying the brisk winter day.

There was one building with sloths, an animal I'd never seen in person, dangling from the ceiling right above our heads, no barriers between us. I couldn't help but think about what horrible things would befall these slow-moving creatures if they were stuck in an American zoo without supervision and barriers to protect them from weak-willed teenagers or malicious vandals. The Germans seem to be guided by a stronger moral code: do what you're supposed to so society can function.

The Otter House was steamy, almost too warm compared to the frigid air outside. The room was divided in two: on one side, a huge exhibit with deep water and land; on the other side, a pair of otters in a grassy exhibit with logs and vegetation.

There they were: the Riesenotter. In the larger exhibit, the Giant Otters moved deftly through the water and onto land in an endless cycle. They were, as their name suggests, giant: adult males can reach over 5 feet. They lacked the cuteness of their smaller cousins, all sinewy muscles and powerful movements. Giant Otters, native to the Amazon and hunted extensively, are one of the rarest otter species in the world, with only a few thousand believed to survive in the wild, and the privilege of seeing them in person was not lost on me. My boyfriend and I watched them chitter to each other, dive in the water, surface onto the shore, and repeat the sequence at least a hundred times, enraptured by the elegance of their dance. Then, just as if operating under a hive mind, all the otters simultaneously surfaced as a zoo attendant emerged from a back room to feed them their lunches of fish. After eating, they all piled on top of one another, falling asleep in a tangle of fur and snouts.