Today's big attraction was the Beijing Zoo. Our Chinese group leaders were very keen about seeing the Zoo's pandas, which seem to be the main attraction for most visitors to the Zoo. Indeed, when we enter the zoo, most people made a beeline for the exhibit, and its associated gift shop. Most of the other gift shops throughout the zoo were stocked to the brim with panda merchandise and not much else. I got the feeling that the Zoo's main focus was pandas and other native Chinese wildlife. The Zoo was pretty typical fare, but I was distressed by how the Zoo treated the big cats. The Zoo's selection of pumas and jaguars was put in a decrepit and falling apart Soviet-style building and looked as if they were procured on a whim and then forgotten. They were all confined in 12 x 20 foot cages without any sort of stimulation except one who was given a log for entertainment. All exhibited signs of confinement stress, especially a furiously pacing panther who had dug a foot-deep hole into his wooden floor. It was an extremely depressing sight to see animals with such large and stimulating natural ranges confined to essentially a jail cell. After that exhibit, we got to see one of the several take-a-picture with a baby chimpanzee stations throughout the Zoo. What happens to the chimpanzees once they grow older and less cute, there certainly wasn't enough space in the Chimp exhibit for all of them. Probably the same thing that happens to the unsold puppies on the street corners. I also noticed that Zoo patrons seemed eager to ignore the signs against feeding the animals, bringing in plenty of vegetables to get the animals close enough to pet. Many of the animals looked pretty obese thanks to this, and all the bears had matted hair or were even balding in spots from sitting on their haunches so much. In the lion exhibit, the dozing male lion was surrounded by at least a dozen water bottles thrown by frustrated patrons who wanted to see an awake lion.
After the visit to the Zoo, we crossed the street to go the humongous markets there. I've never seen so many shoes in my life. I tried to buy a shirt which had terrible engrish on it, but the vendor were unwilling to haggle much, and I got laughed out of the shop for asking too low of a starting price.
Later on in the night, we went out to see some Chinese nightlife. We went to an artificial lake with was ringed by bars. The layout was reminiscent of Pleasure Island in Disneyworld. Each bar was louder than the next, it was hard to hear the person next to you on the sidewalk, let alone inside. Most had live music, which was actually a person singing or lipsyncing the vocals to an entirely pre-recorded track. The keyboards and music stands they stood in front of were merely props and never touched. The propreitors kept up the Chinese tradition of harassing potential clients. This was probably made worse by the fact that we were quite obviously tourists. Every bar had two or three hawkers out front who would shout the three English words they knew at you: "hello", "hey", and "sir". Some would begin walking with you and start speaking rapidly in Chinese despite our best attempts to convey we had no idea what they were saying. If we stopped at all to talk about where we were going next, we were rapidly surrounded by all the hawkers within 100 meters. One especially persistent group intercepted us a half-mile ahead of their bar and tempted us with promises of "disco" and "Lady Gaga". As we sat waiting to rendering with the rest of the group, we were repeatedly harassed by vendors with laser pointers. I don't understand how the Chinese can tolerate this nonstop marketing even in their free time. I suppose that is a big difference between Western and Chinese culture, the acceptance of pushy and constant advertising and hawking. We have our own omnipresent advertising culture through image, audio, and video advertising I suppose, while the Chinese have their more personal physical presence.