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Published: October 6th 2009
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Pandas
The only photo - stupid Chinese electricity! Hello everybody
Electricity issues again, plus late nights, more excuses, but here's the next blog!
After all the excitement (or not) of National Day, we slept in a bit this morning, once again we had plans of going to BaDaChu, but that didn't pan out, so we waited until about 11:30 to decide to go to the Beijing Zoo, even though we've only heard terrible things about it. It's easy to get there now too becuase they've just opened line 4 (in the last week), which goes right outside the zoo, so it was pretty simple finding our way there, before you had to catch the subway and a bus to get there. Unfortunately, because of all our electricity issues, we couldn't charge the battery in the camera, so when we got there, I took one photo of a bird and realised I only had one photo left and saved it for the pandas - so that explains why there are so few photos.
The zoo is MUCH better than all the reports I've heard. The bear enclosure is not good admittedly, and the big cats could do with a bit more room, but all in all the animals looked healthy and happy and there wasn't any cruelty going on. No cruelty, that is, except for the people who came to visit - they were unbelievable. If the lions weren't moving, people would throw water bottles at them. There were at least 20 water bottles in the lion enclosure. And there's a bit sign before the brown bears saying that we shouldn't feed them because it makes them sick, so everybody, of course, was throwing the poor bear chips, but maybe it's used to it now. Anyway, otherwise it was OK, the people here just have no idea of how to treat animals I guess.
Some of the enclosures were brilliant. The panda show wasn't so impressive unless you love pandas, and being crushed by people - kind of like a conservative mosh pit. But the hippos were amazing, we were watching them swim around, then yelling at each other (that what I reckon was happening anyway), and then they climbed out of the water. THEY WERE SO HUGE. Absolutely incredible. I can't believe anything can be that big.
There were monkey enclosures too that were just stunning, and the monkeys were so cool and playful, we stuck around there for a while and then checked out the Gorilla who was...damn, I'm running out of superlatives...well, lets just say awesome.
It's a good zoo. You can see the animals up close and they are happy. And it's cheap, only RMB30 if you want to see the pandas too. There's an aquarium that I'd like to go to, it's very new and quite expensive though, so maybe later on.
Anyway, that's all, I'll try to be a bit more consistent with these blogs from now on!!!
Hope everybody's well.
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GARRETT
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HEY RAY WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO SEE THE GREAT WALL