For the weekend, we decided to head to the zoo to see the famous Chinese pandas. Two other teachers from our school, Linda and Xin Xin joined us, but Christine opted out. She warned us that a few years back she had also made the trip to the zoo, and it left a very bad taste in her mouth till know. We didn’t know what she meant until we got there and saw it for ourselves with our own eyes.
Entrance ticket to the zoo costs RMB20 per person, and so we headed to see the giant pandas first because it was overcrowded and filled with people who can’t seem to make up their mind where to go.
Sadly, there were only one panda awake when we got there, and another was sleeping in a corner. The panda apppear to be aware that all attention was on him, so he had a good time rolling up and down, garnering laughs from the audience.
They had a whole building dedicated as a panda preservation center to the black and white animals. Other than some descriptions of the panda’s life cycle, it was mostly filled with goods, tempting people to buy them.
Sadly, other than the giant pandas, the other animals weren’t so fortunate to receive this kind of first class treatment.
The bears were one of the worst. The chinese visitors were throwing empty plastic bottles at it, and some even pouring the contents of the bottle onto the poor bears. Only one bear was walking around while the rest were huddled away in a corner, but that didn’t stop them from throwing things at those hiding away. We were so disgusted by what we saw, we shouted for them to stop, but they didn’t understood us and went on doing that. Imagine, the children were doing it while their parents encouraged them on!
We then moved on to the lions, who obviously didn’t fare better. The lion look malnourished and sad, its skin was in a bad condition. As usual, much jeering and items being thrown at it by the visitors. We were so mad, so angry at what we saw, we stormed off and decided that we had enough of this madness.
Apparently it turned out that we were of a much larger attraction than the animals. They were pointing fingers at us when we sat down for a drink, huddling around us and saying ‘老外！老外！’ (‘foreigners!’). It was so uncomfortable so we decided to just leave the zoo for good.
Went outside to McDonald’s for lunch, then randomly followed some local into an underground shopping mall, where we did some shopping in the humid, and crowded atmosphere. Apparently the underground mall runs a long way, so we only visited a small section of it, before it was time to meet up with the two other teachers to head back to our school.
While taking the subway back, saw a crippled old man playing the ‘dizi’, or Chinese flute, to beg for money. His playing was good but sad, and that tune got stuck in my head for some time till now.
この長い旅で 