The Zoo

Just last week Phil, Garrett, Sean, Stephanie, Renee and I went to the zoo. I was excited to go but at the same time a bit skeptical. Zoos make me happy and sad. I absolutely love watching and photographing the animals, but at the same time when they are in small cages and you can tell they aren't being cared for correctly it makes me sad. Once I went to the zoo in Beijing and I was disappointed with the conditions there, the cages were much too small and all of the animals seemed depressed. Knowing that China isn't revered for its treatment of animals I expected to see much of the same at the Guangzhou zoo.

It was about a 35 minute metro ride and then a short bus trip from downtown Guangzhou. It was an absolutely beautiful day. There was a soft warm breeze to accompany the sun. Sean, in his typical fashion forward thinking, bought a very colorful and squishy hat at the entrance to the park. Phil was very helpful, we found out later he used to be a zoo tour guide, and got us cheaper tickets because we were all "couples".

My first impression of the zoo was how large it was! Phil started to lead the way and we all followed. We went to catch the safari-esk tram and on the way we passed tons of beautiful parrots in the open. They weren't caged in at all! The safari tour was very cool; it consisted of many open spaces with animals from different world regions. There were cheetahs, lions, camels, gazelles, giraffe, ostrich, hippos, tigers, and much more! They were sling-shooting lunch to the tigers that then lunged at the pieces of flying meat. Very exciting.

After the safari we walked around and saw many of the traditional zoo animals. Some of their living quarters were a bit small, but all seemed to be well taken care of.

By far the best thing we did was go to the baby animal section. We got to feed a baby white tiger for only 20 Yuan, which is $3.50! It was so soft and cute! It put it's paws up on my arm to get closer to the bottle. We all fed the tiger aside from Phil and then just watched it while it played with the workers shoelaces.

After that there was an interesting elephant show and us being five minutes too late to see the pandas.

Overall it was a great day at the zoo, which really impressed me with the living spaces for all the animals. We later found out that it is the largest zoo in southern China, how cool is that!