Guangzhou Zoo

Today was our day to visit the Guangzhou Zoo. I was excited to go because I've seen lots of people's blogs who have visited the zoo and it looked like a lot of fun. If the pictures seem up close and personal, it's because we REALLY were that close to the animals; none of these pictures were zoomed in. The zoo was different from where we live. There are really great zoos in Seattle and Portland, but there is so much "habitat" that it's hard to find the animals sometimes. This zoo was about 50% habitat, 50% cages so it was a lot easier to see the animals.

Guangzhou has brought in another panda for the Asian Games. They normally only have one but now they have two. The panda exhibit was closed because they were fixing a fence so the pandas weren't out. Our guide, Maggie, told the people at the zoo that we were adoptive families coming to see the pandas, so the zookeepers allowed us to go inside and see the pandas. We sterilized our feet and a few of us at a time were allowed to go into the panda building to see the bears. We were probably 5 feet away from them. We could have reached out and touched them, but we didn't want to get in trouble.

After we got back from the zoo it was nap time. It took me 17 rounds of "Rock-a-bye Baby" to get Cara to sleep. She slept for 2 hours and then we went to the park. She just wanted to chase around today so we left pretty quickly and went back to the room to pack. Cara was dragging things out just about as fast as we were packing things up so it took longer than we would have liked. Then we went to dinner one last time at Lucy's. Lucy's isn't really all that great, but the other restaurant choices have baby pigeon, chicken feet, pig neck, ostrich intestines, etc. Lucy's is probably the safest bet so we've eaten there 3 times.

Now we are just finishing up packing and showering to leave tomorrow morning. We are checked out and need to meet in the lobby tomorrow morning at 5:50. Ses the picture of Cara on the bed with all of the brown envelopes? This is the documentation we need to carry on for her. We need the red adoption folder, the "brown envelope" for immigration, the medical records with her passport stapled to it because of her TB test, and her TB x-ray. That's a lot of stuff to carry on with 5 backpacks and a 3-year-old.

Tomorrow we fly to Beijing, have a 5-hour layover, fly to Seattle, then drive home. It will definitely be a long day, but I will be happy to go home. I won't blog tomorrow because of traveling, but I hope to blog sometime this weekend. I like to read people's travel blogs, but then it seems like everyone stops the minute they get home and I never get to see how it's going or how people's babies deal with the transition. I'm going to do my best to try to keep up with blogging.