While the weather was still nice, once again Eli joined me for an afternoon at the zoo. I had heard from a couple of my coworkers back in Hangzhou about how their zoo experiences in China were rather depressing. I remember my experience at a “zoo” when I was in Lanxi (you can’t really call it that though; it was far too small, and the areas the animals were kept in were not appropriate for the size of the animals). Anyway, my experience at the Guangzhou Zoo was a good one. Most of the animal exhibits that I saw looked like they had an adequate amount of space for animals in captivity (especially for China). The only exhibits that seemed to be lacking were those of the lions. I felt like their cages should have been bigger, and they really needed more things in them for mental stimulation.

I also tried taking photos of some of the bird exhibits, but the camera couldn’t get the right depth of field focus, so I just had to pass on some of them. But I still managed to get some good shots of some other birds.

At one point, when we first arrived at the bird area, a woman was taking photos, and when she spotted me, she decided that I was apparently also worth taking a picture of. I took a “selfie” of us for her. I wasn’t sure whether to feel special or to feel like an object to be gawked at, like one of the exhibits. Such is life for a foreigner here in China.

By the time we got around to the lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!) areas, it was close to closing time, and more of the animals were inside eating or sleeping. We also didn’t have time to see any of the marine animals.