Thursday, March 31 - Last day in Beijing!!

Today was our last full day in Beijing!  Tomorrow we are leaving for Guangzhou - the last main city of our trip!  We will be there for 5 nights while we finish the American side of our paperwork at our long awaited Consulate Appointment.  We are REALLY looking forward to a change of location since we have been in Beijing for 10 nights now.  That's a long time to be in one hotel room!  We have heard that Guangzhou caters a lot to all the American adoptive families, so to be completely honest we are looking forward to that.  Different environment, more adoptive families around, hopefully less stares everywhere we go.  We're also hoping that it is a bit easier to find what we need while we are there.  We are still very low on clothing that fits Lydia, especially warmer weather clothing which is what we will need in Guangzhou.  So we are hoping it is easier to find.  I guess worse case scenario, she wears things that are too big and looks like a beach bum in baggy clothing!

Today we didn't do a lot of sightseeing, just the Beijing Zoo.  We had two hours on our own there before meeting back up with our guide, and honestly we were ready to leave after 20 minutes.  By this morning we felt like we were just killing time waiting to be able to get Lydia's passport tomorrow.  Plus, the zoo was about the saddest one we have ever seen.  They had a fair amount of animals, but the habitats were extremely sad and the buildings were very run down.  Lydia liked seeing the animals because she clearly hasn't seen them in real life before.  But the whole trip made us very excited to get her home and show her a real zoo!

The best kept exhibit they had was the Panda exhibit.  There were three different pandas in three separate habitats.  This was the only active one and it was eating bamboo.

Lydia liked seeing all the animals

She really liked the monkeys, until two of them ran up to the glass right where she was standing.  A bit like the little pug moving toward her, she shrieked and jumped away, almost falling off of the little stone ledge she was standing on.  We had to move away from the monkeys after that because she didn't like when they moved!

The very sad bear habitat.  There were 3 bears in this pen.  There is nothing in there for them.  Not even water in the water hole.

People were feeding the animals all kinds of things - popcorn, potato chips, anything they had.  The thing we are never allowed to do in zoos across America because we all know it isn't good for the animals.

Despite the signs everywhere, people still feed them.  We have seen many examples here that rules with no enforcement are no rules at all.

The sad lion exhibit.  Again, nothing in the pen.  Not even water in the moat.

Same story with the elephants.  No water, nothing for them to do.

Another elephant pen.  Many run down buildings.

What you see here is the whole habitat for this rhinoceros.  From one wall to another.

They did have a lot of zebras.  And they were very close up to the fence.  Of course that also meant that they were eating whatever people were choosing to give them.

 After the zoo, we didn't do a whole lot because we needed quite a bit of time in the room to clean up the disaster this hotel room has become, and to start packing up our bags for our flight tomorrow.  


I don't have many other things to write about from today, but I do have a couple of photos I can post just of fun stuff.  These are a couple of cute pictures from the zoo.  They had a line of little coin-operated rides for kids, two of which happened to be characters from Lydia's favorite cartoon.  We let her sit in them, but she didn't get to ride on them since we didn't have any Chinese coins.

 And a couple of funny things from the zoo:  the gift shops had really random things in them, not just things we would think of at a zoo store.  They had any cheap toy that they thought some kid might succeed in begging for.  Our two favorites were these - what do these have to do with the Beijing zoo exactly??

Mickey Mouse ears??  At the Beijing zoo??

Or how about a US space shuttle?

As soon as I finish this post, I am going to start uploading a video too.  I started to put it in this post, but it was taking too long to upload and I couldn't publish this one until the video was done. So I thought instead I would get this one finished, start uploading a video in a new post, and then go to bed.  And I will publish the video post in our morning after it has finished uploading.

Onto our three things we are thankful for today...


1.  That in zoos at home kids are not allowed to poop on the sidewalk.  Yes, we saw this today.  No, I'm not kidding.


2.  That we are leaving tomorrow for the last leg of our trip.  Starting into the home stretch now!


3.  That Lydia said her first mostly English sentence today.  It was a hybrid sentence, mostly English with one Chinese word.  She was looking at photos and one of me came up wearing a hat.  She said, "Mama has a 'mow-duh' on!"  She pronounces the Chinese word for hat as 'mow-duh'.  So she used her Chinese word for hat, but put it into an English sentence!  Yay for small steps!