The first evening there, they picked us up from the bus station and when we arrived at their apartment, Kathleen had prepared the most delicious cheesy veggie soup. It was like half cheese and half potato and half broccoli, and half awesome. We hung out and enjoyed speaking English with them most of the night. After finishing a few exciting rounds of banangrams, we went to bed.
For breakfast, Kathleen had pre-made (bless her heart) a bunch of breakfast burritos with real cheese, sausage, and egg. I had mine with some ketchup and it was like eating a McDonald's breakfast burrito on steroids. Nick had to go to work for the morning so we went with Kathleen to bum around at the department store and grab some food at her import store. On the way home, we stopped to buy some baseball-sized cream puffs that were to die for. So delicious.
After meeing up with Nick again, we took a taxi over to the local zoo (and when I say local, I'm talking about a zoo in the middle of a city the size of Beijing). The Cleggs had lived in Baoding for sometime now and going to the zoo was on their bucket list before going away. We braced ourselves as we bought tickets and entered the zoo because the Cleggs had only heard negative things about the zoo and how the animals were poorly cared for and seemed so sad. I'm just going to say up front that the rumor was mostly true, but that doesn't mean we still didn't have a very interesting experience there. I will put a few pictures in here to show some of the things we saw, and how it was not your traditional zoo experience.
While walking around, a young Chinese couple wanted Nick to hold their baby so they could take a picture. I thought it was so funny how they just stared at each other.
We found Kevin from the movie UP!!
This is the Queen of all chicken fowl.
THIS... is the King of all chicken fowl.
These are the emperors of all Cuzcopian birds.
Staring contest... GO!
He just wanted someone to talk to.
This was a baby fawn that was born just before we arrived. We watched it take its first run. We also watched the other deer eat the placenta together.
Caaaaaaammellllllllllll.
If you know who Sam Oak is, you better watch this video.
This leopard mama was pregnant. We asked her is she would show us her belly and this is what she did.
The Siberian Tigers were very bored. Laying out in true cat style.
I think this one was hungry. Look at those eyes!
The lions were also very bored.
The tiger was chewing on a bottle that someone had thrown into its cage. How sad.
After a plastic bottle, anything looks tasty...
That's a big kitty.
The Boading Zoo also offered a small array of ferrell cats, complete with aggressive fighting over a ball of cat food.
We also had fun at the petting zoo. The goats were anxious to get some snackage.
Don't miss the video!
Looks like a happy rabbit doesn't it?
The small monkeys were kept in these really dirty cubicles, but they were so interested in us.
We heard some screaming near the monkey cages, and about 10 minutes later we walked over to find this. We were fairly miffed by how something like this happened. Our best guess is that the mama monkey was wounded while trying to protect her baby. Her tail was also severely damaged. You wouldn't see this in an American zoo.
Without any regard for the signs, the Chinese locals brought bags full of fruit and nuts for the animals to eat. These monkeys were catching food from inside their cages.
This one looks like he's trying to make a deal with the lady who has the fruit.
This bear was begging for food. There was trash all over in his concrete pit.
I can think of two captions for this picture. Either the bear is saying, "Lean over that rail just a little further." or someone is saying to the bear, "Spread' em!!"
This is called a Sun bear. They had very interesting faces and really short hair. They used these bears for circus performances at some point. Here is a video below of this bear. If you listen carefully, you can hear Kathleen trying to make the bear spin around. After trying without success, the Chinese lady next to her says, "He can't hear English". So then the Chinese lady gives the command in Chinese and the bear quickly does a 360 and recieves a peeled orange as a reward.
Isn't this guy cute. Makes me think of Little Bear.
The deer were very friendly! Not afraid at all!
I took this picture because I like his stance. Looks like a dance move from the 70's.
The elephants were doing this crazy trunk hug thing .
So here comes one of the coolest parts about our trip to the Baoding Zoo. As we approached the giraffe exhibit, a maintenance guy (who happened to be the only zookeeper that we saw that day) took us around the side of the building and unlocked a door for us to go inside the giraffe exhibit. We were feeling pretty special and then realized that he'd left us in there alone. I noticed that the door to go up the stairs to the feeding area was open. So I grabbed some dried leaves from the feed pile and creeped up the stairs. When I got to the top, the giraffe knew exactly what time it was... time to eat some leaves. So I whipped out the camera and started recording a very close encounter with this giraffe. The video is below. Please take time to notice Alicia's reaction after she tries feeding the giraffe.
This is the zookeeper that let us in. Nick wanted to personally thank him by taking his picture.
Three or four hours later, we were getting a little cold and decided to get some dinner. The Cleggs took us to Pizza Hut. We opted to go there because we had seen it in our city but been too afraid to go and be served something that wanted to be pizza but wasn't pizza. (That's happened before at another restaurant). Turns out, the Pizza Hut here is a lot the same as in America. You get gobs of cheese on every pizza... and stuffed crust. Wow. We were very happy about our experience there and made an immediate plan to go there for Thanksgiving the following week. After returning to the apartment, we hung out and spent some good time playing the Wii that the Cleggs had brought from America.
The next morning we had pancakes, bacon, and eggs for breakfast. MMMmmmm. The Cleggs know how to do it. Unfortunately, Alicia has been cursed ever since with a desire to get some bacon from our own supermarket here in Cangzhou, and every week she goes back to scan the deli section with no succes. I guess they just don't appreciate good bacon here in China. We had church in their livingroom like we did last time, and it is always better when we can share that time with other members.
Before we prepared to leave, we decided to bust out the Wii again. We found some games that the Cleggs had never even played before, which included a game where the two players face off in a series of mental challenges like puzzles, math, memory, patterns, etc. As you might have guessed, Alicia was so dang good at this game. Kathleen and Nick didn't even want to play after they saw how bad Alicia beat me. So the race was on. I had to challenge Alicia over and over as Nick sat on the couch and laughed every time she would blow me out of the water. My wife is brilliant.
So we put our stuff together, which included a whole two suitcases of hand-me-downs from the Cleggs, and walked towards the street to get a taxi. We couldn't thank the Cleggs enough for how much they had given us and how much fun we had with them. We look forward to seeing them sometime in the future (probably back in Idaho.)
At the bus station, we commenced our typical routine of playing dumb to one of the bus station attendants. In doing so, we were able to catch an earlier bus than what our tickets said (just like last time). When we got to our city, we found a tiny motorized rickshaw to take us back to our school just like last time. We will always look back at our trips to Baoding as one of the many fun things we did in China.
Ah, we had so much fun with you guys and are so glad you could visit with us. The zoo was such a fun day, although quite disturbing. We look forward to seeing you when you return to the States.
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