For me, it would be cyanocephala. But I would also get a thrill from seeing echo in the wild due to their history and rarity.
Hix
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part three: 2013-2014
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
For me, it would be cyanocephala. But I would also get a thrill from seeing echo in the wild due to their history and rarity.
Hix
Zoo Day!! Shanghai Zoo to be precise. The middle part of the day (at the zoo) was good, the opening and ending parts a little trying. Obviously going to Shanghai Zoo from Suzhou is a bit of a longer trip than most zoo visits so I was intending to get started early, but I didn't. In fact I didn't leave until 8am. I took a local bus to the train station first, and stood in queue for twenty minutes only to discover on getting to the counter that I had left my passport back “home” in my pack. You can't buy things like train tickets without identification, so I had to go all the way back (just missing the bus from the station, too, so had to wait on the next one), get my passport, and bus back to the station again. It wasn't until 9.30am that I actually left Suzhou. The train was only a forty minute trip to Shanghai, then onto the subway for half an hour, change to a different line for twenty minutes, and I was at the zoo by 11.30am.
I got distracted upon entering, by the many wild birds which call the zoo grounds home, as well as Pallas' squirrels. For the first hour and a half I didn't actually look at a single caged animal, I was too busy chasing wild ones. I finally thought I better get down to the zoo business and headed back to the entrance to get started. In the end (not unexpectedly) I didn't manage to see the entire zoo, missing out the entire reptile and primate sections, but I was planning on going back to the zoo with Jess in a few days so I'll see them then. Because I didn't see everything and I'm going to be making a return visit, I'll leave writing a review until then, but in brief the Shanghai Zoo is a very good zoo, much better than the Beijing Zoo by a long shot. I liked Beijing, I didn't think it was an awful zoo, but it did have an awful lot of really pretty bad cages. Shanghai in contrast has very few, and of those a good number are only “bad” for aesthetic reasons rather than welfare reasons (I'm not saying that all the other enclosures were brilliant, but they certainly weren't horrible). Also, apart for some people slapping the glass on the red panda enclosure, all the visitors were extremely well-behaved!!! Maybe it is down to how the animals are presented to them.
I was supposed to be meeting Jess after she finished work, and it was roughly two hours back to Suzhou, so at 4.30pm I left the zoo and took the two subways back to the train station where I couldn't find the ticket office for quite a while (it is not in the station, it is for some reason on the opposite side of the street and you have to go through a pedestrian underpass to get to it). Once I got to the office I discovered that the next available train was not until 9.30pm, and it was the slow train (an hour long)! I got back to Suzhou at 10.20pm and found that the bus I needed had stopped running for the night. I spent a lot of time trying to find where the taxis parked (rebuffing the touts who wanted five times the real fare) until eventually discovering that they were all in an underground taxi court entered from within the train station (and I had of course been wandering around outside!). I didn't get back to where I was staying until 11.30pm! And all just because I wanted to go to the zoo....
I got distracted upon entering, by the many wild birds which call the zoo grounds home, as well as Pallas' squirrels. For the first hour and a half I didn't actually look at a single caged animal, I was too busy chasing wild ones. I finally thought I better get down to the zoo business and headed back to the entrance to get started. In the end (not unexpectedly) I didn't manage to see the entire zoo, missing out the entire reptile and primate sections, but I was planning on going back to the zoo with Jess in a few days so I'll see them then. Because I didn't see everything and I'm going to be making a return visit, I'll leave writing a review until then, but in brief the Shanghai Zoo is a very good zoo, much better than the Beijing Zoo by a long shot. I liked Beijing, I didn't think it was an awful zoo, but it did have an awful lot of really pretty bad cages. Shanghai in contrast has very few, and of those a good number are only “bad” for aesthetic reasons rather than welfare reasons (I'm not saying that all the other enclosures were brilliant, but they certainly weren't horrible). Also, apart for some people slapping the glass on the red panda enclosure, all the visitors were extremely well-behaved!!! Maybe it is down to how the animals are presented to them.
I was supposed to be meeting Jess after she finished work, and it was roughly two hours back to Suzhou, so at 4.30pm I left the zoo and took the two subways back to the train station where I couldn't find the ticket office for quite a while (it is not in the station, it is for some reason on the opposite side of the street and you have to go through a pedestrian underpass to get to it). Once I got to the office I discovered that the next available train was not until 9.30pm, and it was the slow train (an hour long)! I got back to Suzhou at 10.20pm and found that the bus I needed had stopped running for the night. I spent a lot of time trying to find where the taxis parked (rebuffing the touts who wanted five times the real fare) until eventually discovering that they were all in an underground taxi court entered from within the train station (and I had of course been wandering around outside!). I didn't get back to where I was staying until 11.30pm! And all just because I wanted to go to the zoo....
I put some photos from the Xian Bird Market here: China - Other Gallery
no I have not. The only one I have seen said "electric heather" which is only very mildly amusing.
Oh, actually I saw a menu which had such items as "fried crap" (unfortunately I can't remember the other dishes, but there were a few other interesting-sounding ones)
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Sounds like the Chinese knockoff of Electric Barbarella.
I have had fried crap on many occasions here in Melbourne, though I suspect that your fried crap in China actually tasted great and cost a fraction of what we pay for crap here.
Before I loose it someone please tell me what "fried crap" is!
~Thylo
~Thylo
Before I loose it someone please tell me what "fried crap" is!
~Thylo
Invert the "r" and the "a".
Ah, okay. Thank you.
~Thylo
~Thylo
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Oh that is just a typo then, and not really Engrish.
Engrish would be like "water of the juice chicken" for "chicken in gravy" and "fry the string bean clearly" for some string bean dish. One of my favorites was the sign for the disabled toilet saying "deformed man".
I went to the Suzhou Zoo two days ago. Review thread here: http://www.zoochat.com/247/suzhou-zoo-visit-3-october-2013-a-339273/
I was expecting to be there most of the day but I was only there for about an hour. It turned out to not be a very good zoo after all, and it was only small. The reason I had gone was to see the Yangtze softshell turtles which are housed there, which I did succeed in seeing.
To get there I had to go to the train station first, and then take bus number 1 to Jiejiaqiao stop from which I then take bus numbers 301 or 305. Something I realised straight away in China is that Chinese people cannot give directions. It's a wonder they find their way anywhere themselves! You will get the basic bones of the directions but not the specifics you need to get between the points of the directions. If you press for more specific instructions they just get confused as to why you would need that. I was trying to find a supermarket the other day and I was told to just go to such-and-such a building and there's a supermarket there. I found the building, I couldn't find the supermarket. The next day I went back with the name of the supermarket written down so I could compare it to the signs; the supermarket was about two blocks away from the building I'd first been told about and couldn't even be seen from there. Going to the zoo, I got off at Jiejiaqiao bus stop and found that bus numbers 310 and 305 don't go from that stop. I eventually found them twenty minutes later in a nearby street. It's all fun and games in China!
I was expecting to be there most of the day but I was only there for about an hour. It turned out to not be a very good zoo after all, and it was only small. The reason I had gone was to see the Yangtze softshell turtles which are housed there, which I did succeed in seeing.
To get there I had to go to the train station first, and then take bus number 1 to Jiejiaqiao stop from which I then take bus numbers 301 or 305. Something I realised straight away in China is that Chinese people cannot give directions. It's a wonder they find their way anywhere themselves! You will get the basic bones of the directions but not the specifics you need to get between the points of the directions. If you press for more specific instructions they just get confused as to why you would need that. I was trying to find a supermarket the other day and I was told to just go to such-and-such a building and there's a supermarket there. I found the building, I couldn't find the supermarket. The next day I went back with the name of the supermarket written down so I could compare it to the signs; the supermarket was about two blocks away from the building I'd first been told about and couldn't even be seen from there. Going to the zoo, I got off at Jiejiaqiao bus stop and found that bus numbers 310 and 305 don't go from that stop. I eventually found them twenty minutes later in a nearby street. It's all fun and games in China!
Have you been to the major zoos in China now, or are there others on your itinerary?
I've been to Beijing and Shanghai which are probably the two that could be legitimately called the "top two" zoos in China. Suzhou turned out to be a minor zoo.
I had been going to go to Wenzhou Zoo which I've heard is large, but I didn't need to go to Wenzhou after all and it is several hours by train from Shanghai so I won't be going there at all now. I didn't visit the zoo in Xian because I had heard some mixed opinions and I thought I'd skip it (although I think baboon told me they have brown and white pandas there [rather than the usual black and white]). I won't be visiting the Wild Animal Park in Shanghai either.
I will be going to the Chengdu Zoo next week, which is another "main zoo" of the country.
I don't have any other zoos planned for China, but I may be in a position to see one or two others at some point. Really China is about wild animals (not that I'm doing very well at finding any yet!!) so I only intended to visit a few zoos while here.