Friday, June 17th - Animal Park/Beidaihe!

Friday's are easily my favourite day of the week....no classes, and there are always fewer people at the attractions that I want to go visit than on the weekends. As a result, I generally try and get a pretty early start and see/do as much as I can!

Today, after skyping with Heather and the kids, I went to the wild animal park (.....It is China, of course they have one!!!!). Then I continued on to Beidaihe for lunch plus to go back to the pearl market one LAST time.

I have talked about Beidaihe in other parts of the blog, but in a few sentences or less, it is basically a district attached to Qinhuangdao, and is located about 8 km away from the College. Even though it is technically part of QHD, it is probably better "known" in and around China than the big city is.

Beidaihe is usually referred to as the "summer capital of China" because many of the top government officials move their offices/residences there in July and August. Further, tons of Russians go to Beidaihe for their summer vacations (and there were quite a few of them in the Animal park today). 

The Wild Animal Park is located in between the College and Beidaihe, and takes up quite a bit of land. It is 60RMB ($9) to get in, but that includes a train ride around the park.

Kind of like the Beijing Zoo, you get mixed feelings about these places.The cages/treatment of the animals is not what you'd expect to see in Canada, but on the other hand, they seem well fed and everything is clean and reasonably well kept. At the end of the day, I think the Chinese just have a different attitude about the whole natural environment than we do...and this is the reason you will see people go to the beach, have a picnic, and leave their garbage there....or why in places like this, you see the old style zoo cages and where you can do things like pay 20RMB to have an elephant pick you up with it's trunk, or 10RMB to play basketball with a monkey (I didn't do any of those types of things.....too "Canadian" I guess?) Although who is to say Canadian's are better, because even though we have much nicer/more natural looking cages in our zoo...it is still a cage? (....yikes, way too deep for me, time to tell another bathroom story!). Plus, I was sure not "above" laughing my head off at the bears on this trip. Some of the Russians on our train car had some bread, and the Bears put on quite a show in order to get some!!!!! (refer to the pictures below).

One last comment about the park....you can also drive your car through it! Plus as you can see from the pictures, there was technically nothing stopping the people in these cars from getting out and walking around the Lion or Tiger cage....except for signs posted saying "danger, don't get out of your car". I am quite sure we would not have this type of "set up" in Canada...but I think the Chinese park might make more sense. They are actually giving people credit for having a brain. Plus, there are lots of Chinese, and so maybe they think that if someone is stupid enough to get out of the car - then in a survival of the strongest/smartest type way......they are getting rid of a dumb one, and the country is better off.

Going back to the whole different natural environment attitude comment above, I do have to say that is seems like the Chinese attitude might be changing. You are starting to see things like the protected wetlands area that has been built as you go into Beidaihe (which I don't think would have "happened" in the not to distant past). The pictures are below, but this area is where the river goes out into the sea. The Chinese have fenced off a large area and designated it as federally protected wetland....of course, being China, there are also a number of people walking through it gathering clams (I think?)

One other thing that I wanted to mention/remember when I look back on this blog is how much I have walked this trip! In fact, today I walked to the animal park, and then to, and around Beidaihe. I took a bus home, but even in doing this, I probably totaled about 10-12 km. Further, I am sure that I have averaged 5+ km walking per day since I have been here because even on "work days", I have to walk to get breakfast. lunch and dinner, and classes.......and on the days that I go see something, I basically walk the whole day. I do note that it is pretty "easy" to walk here because there are so many people and things to look at. This has been great, and I am quite sure I have lost some weight because of this. If I were here another month or so, I could go back to the bungee jumping guy and he would no longer be able to tell me I am too fat to bungee bunch!