After boarding the bus in the morning, we soon found ourselves in a traffic nightmare rivaling any American traffic jam. Rush hour in Beijing is horrible, gridlock even through the intersections, which were terrible tangles of cars and bikes. Nevertheless, we eventually got over to the Zoo and were excited to see pandas as well as other animals (but mostly pandas). The instant we entered the zoo, we went straight to the pandas, which were at the front of the zoo anyway. Unfortunately, the time we saw the pandas was during feeding time, so their backs were turned to us. The first three were barely visible. But in the next building there was a group of four young pandas which were playing and sleeping, they made for good pictures and were very cute.
The next few pandas were in outdoor pens and were also being fed, so no good pictures there. The interesting thing was that the people watching these pandas were also bored, and they decided that watching the Americans would be much more entertaining. We were basically stared at like we were in the pens instead of the pandas. This was another den of snipers as well as people who wanted to take pictures with us.
We then split up to see the rest of the zoo. First we came upon the “North American Animals” area which had raccoons, skunks, badgers, and even squirrels up on display. To us, they seemed bland and uninteresting. But to the Chinese they were strange and intriguing, which we found humorous. The rest of the zoo was pretty much like any American zoo, with hippos, rhinos, tigers, elephants, etc. The only exception was the zebras. All of the zebras were along the railings being fed and touched by the crowd, despite the signs that said not to.
Next we had lunch at a Chinese fast food place called Yoshinoya. We were recommended a beef dish and I ordered one with a small side salad. The salad only came with Thousand Island dressing (blech), but I ate the tomatoes and broccoli out of it. The beef on the other hand, was extremely tasty and reminded me of a dish that I had had before but could not place. Anyway after lunch we headed over to a shopping mall unlike the other malls we had been to. This one was not modern, and had more in common with the street markets than a conventional mall. Stores were more like stalls than anything else and everything was fake. From the pumas to the polos, everything imitated standard brand names but was cheap and flawed upon closer inspection. I only bought a tie because I forgot one, but I spoke Chinese when purchasing it and spent the remainder of the time at the mall helping translate for my friends and the vendors.
We returned to the hotel and relaxed for a while until we all got into taxis and headed over to, according to Dr. Gao, one of the centers of Beijing nightlife. The taxi ride was pretty short and seemed even shorter as I tried to hear what Dr. Gao was saying to the multiple people he called on the way over, with decent success I might add. Once we arrived we found ourselves looking at a large lake surrounded by the lights of stores and bars. We walked around for a while before finally settling on a bar that one of our hosts recommended. We sat and talked for a while, though I did not drink, until we moved back out onto the street. We then spent the next couple hours walking around the lake, which was very beautiful, especially with all of the soft lights coming from the bars. We even stopped in a tea shop to look around for a bit and sampled some tea. Before long we returned to the hotel, and I went to sleep almost immediately.