Day 10: “This is the nicest Pizza Hut I’ve ever been in.”

Day 10: “This is the nicest Pizza Hut I’ve ever been in.” quote by Jeff

We went to the Shanghai zoo today. First off, anyone who knows me knows I am not a relaxed passenger when others are driving. I prefer to drive. The taxis here freak me out! They weave in and out of traffic at amazing speeds and none of us are wearing seatbelts. I can’t relax for a second. I will ride the subway anywhere, but I avoid the taxis as much as I can. We didn’t get through the entire zoo today; I’d really like to go back and see the rest of it, but I need a break from the taxi scene.

The two words that come to mind for me to describe the zoo today are interesting and sad. Having been to zoos all over the west coast and a couple in Canada I have to say that this one was very interesting. Not because the animals were so different, but the people going to it were rude and disrespectful to the animals. It has been interesting because no matter where we go there are a ton of official type people working keeping order. Keeping order is important here. Every time we have gone to the playground across the street some one older than 10 has tried to ride the teeter-totter and been shooed off by some official, telling them they need to follow the rules (the park is for 3-10 year olds). Today at the zoo there were hardly any workers. I have to say it was the one place I haven’t felt particularly safe. It was very woodzy and not a lot of people there. So we would often times be alone with a small group of people (sometimes all men, which is when I would get more uptight). I can’t explain exactly why I felt unsafe, but my safety radar was up the entire time. The sad part was nearly every exhibit we went to had humans throwing food or garbage at the animals. People seemed to be doing it because they thought they were being funny. If they couldn’t get to the animals physically then they pounded on the glass. A set of baboons got several plastic bottles to chew on and one baby baboon was walking around with the plastic water bottle lid in its mouth.

I was really worried about these animals and there was no one to tell what was happening. Now at the park, there are a ton of workers to make people follow the rules, but here at the zoo where lives are at stake there was nobody. I felt really sad for these animals. Notice the group of people offering the giraffe the water bottles in the picture below.

Since everything is written in Chinese I don’t know if this is privately owned and perhaps that’s why there are no workers, but I do find it very interesting that this is the one place we have been without any workers (even the public bathrooms have a worker or two).

We surprised Riley and Claire and went to Pizza Hut for dinner tonight. It is really nice and sort of glitzy inside. When we walked by the outside we didn’t realize it was a Pizza Hut at first because it had white table clothes and a really nice atmosphere. It had REALLY nice napkins too! And they were free! (I found out that we are being charged for the napkins in every restaurant…except the food court we go to for lunch every day. Sorry if you are tired of hearing about the napkins, but it’s really becoming inconvenient and tiring to eat with my children without adequate napkins). We chose to have what we consider normal pizza from home to fulfill that need for some of home. There were some interesting choices, several fish options and corn; I would never have thought to add corn to pizza. Our pizza tasted pretty much like pizza from home. The kids were happy. Then we stopped by Haagen Dazs ice cream; since we were having a dinner from home we might as well have a dessert from home too. I was shocked! We all had one scoop each (one very small scoop btw) and it was 40 Yuan each…which means we paid $22 dollars for five scoops of ice cream. I think we refilled our home reservoir for a while.

Here is a funny picture of the kids. We were at the zoo. There was some really pretty foliage that I wanted a picture of, but the trees were filled with birds and there was poop all over the ground. The kids were freaked out that the birds were going to poop on them. You can see the looks on their faces. I still enjoyed the background. :0) And no one got pooped on.