Beijing Day 5

Friday was the day of the actual reason for the trip to Beijing. While I attended my workshop during the morning and early afternoon, Tim went out to Fragrant Hills Park, a common destination for Beijingers looking to escape the city. Not only is it a pretty nice park, but it contains some nice gardens and buildings as well. It's pretty hilly (think Ozark mountains for you Missourians), and so Tim's trip included a ski lift venture just to speed up some of the climbing progress. There was the potential for some nice views from out there, too, but it was a pretty bad day on the air quality scale. But you can pretend that's mist in the photos.

After Tim returned and my workshop concluded, we tried to figure out how to spend the late afternoon and evening. I discovered that the Beijing zoo was only a two mile walk (OK, it turned into 3+...) from our hotel. So we headed out down the busy street. We arrived at the zoo about an hour and a half before closing. Plenty of time to see the pandas. Now, our guidebooks had warned us that the panda exhibit was worth the trip but not to expect the zoo to be up to western standards. How unnecessary the warning was! The zoo was WONDERFUL! We hurried to the panda exhibit to make sure we had enough time to see them. We wandered through there; they had a whole piece of the exhibit with 8 cubs under 2 years old on display. They were so cute. Tim took at least a hundred pictures of just pandas. (OK, I exaggerate. But I just counted, and the number is 71.) But we were left with enough time to wander around the rest of the zoo, too. We didn't see a lot because it was pretty spread out and the areas for different animals ("pens" sounds so barbaric) were large. In our opinion, the zoo was in fact up to western standards.

For dinner, we continued down the street to the old soviet-style Beijing exhibition center. It was cool in and of itself, but it also contained a lovely Russian restaurant. OK, so the food wasn't great, but the ambiance was excellent. OF course, we caught a cab back to the hotel...

Beijing Day 5