Tuesday, September 27: Part I: Beijing Zoo

Once in Beijing we made contact with Andrew who had spent a year studying in Ann Arbor.  He offered to take us to the Great Wall since he had just gotten a car 3 months earlier.  But he had to teach a class in the morning, so we arranged to meet him outside the Beijing Zoo.

First we went to the bus stop where a breakfast cart had just been set up.

The bus goes right to the subway.

The ticket machine

Then we took the subway to the Zoo exit.  It was pretty obvious that we had gotten the correct station.

This restaurant was right outside the zoo:

The Beijing Zoo was founded in the 32nd year of Emperor Guangxu reign in Qing dynasty (1906 AD).
This zoo has a special panda exhibit and lots of really natural settings for their animals.

Lesser Panda

One of the nice things about it being China was that they could grow the bamboo in the wild:

The bird area:

They also had bronze displays to show which type of animals were in an area.

The bird area

Tigers

This one represented American animals, mostly llamas.

We also saw Australian and African animals:

People watching was as interesting as animal watching, especially children: