Yesterday we visited the zoo in Beijing and saw the first giant pandas in their homeland. There were two buildings each with 4-5 pandas. As expected, they were not really active, most of them sleeping and the rest of them munching on bamboo or watermelon. It is quite funny to watch them eating like a king, laying on their backs, with their hind legs comfortably stretched out and slowly chewing their food that they hold on their fat belly. In the panda houses there were quite informative posters about the pandas and their conservation and their relation with the Olympic Games in 2008. But it was almost the only place in the whole zoo, where some more detailed information was available. In the rest of the zoo, only the names of the animals were written in English, everything else was in Chinese. The housing conditions of the larger animals was not that outrageous. As probably any zoo that is confined to the middle of a large city, this zoo must also be struggling with space problems. For example, they have only a few outdoor enclosures for the large cats, so half of them had to stay indoors in cages which are definitely way too small for them. They have the well known and sad heritage of other zoos as well: the menagerie kind of housing. So I guess it will take quite some time and money to get rid of it and convert the zoo into a nice spacious habitat for the animals. What I missed though in many places were the environmental enrichment practices, including toys to prevent boredom of the animals. A very annoying thing was the behaviour of the local visitors. They were knocking loudly on every window or shouting, to wake up the sleeping animals or to make them look into their cameras. Feeding of the animals is also a common practise, in spite of the large forbidding sings. An interesting feature of the Beijing zoo is the arbitrary mixing of different species in the same enclosure, e.g. chicken or squirrel monkey from South America with the ring-tailed lemur from Madagascar. Chicken we also saw in the cages of other animals and it made us think where the fried chicken in the food stalls next to these cages might originate from...
The day before yesterday we spent in the southern part of downtown Beijing. Our original goal was to visit the Underground City that is a long tunnel system, dug out in the 70s in the fear of a nuclear attack surprise, surprise from the Soviets! It was dug out by hand by over 300'000 citizens. In the case of an attack it could have housed 40% of the city's population and had room for hospitals, schools, mushroom cultivation facilities (that can grow without sunlight), bathrooms, cinemas etc. However, it seems to be impossible to visit these tunnels as a tourist. On different websites 3 different addresses are listed as potential entrances, but they are either closed permanently (永久, as we found out at 62 Xidamo Changjie, Qianmen) or have a different function now (theatre, camera shop). So instead of the underground tunnels, we visited the close-by Temple of Heaven. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Why exactly is not really clear to me, as we did not find it all that interesting. It is located in the middle of a well-kept large park (it actually does not have much useful space for locals to do activities as there are only few benches and open spaces). The temple itself is a round wooden building with similar decoration as the palaces in the Forbidden City. It is connected with an elevated walkway to another temple and to the Round Altar. The latter one is a 3 level marble construction that symbolises heaven. The purpose of these buildings was for the emperor to pray for good harvest and offer animal sacrifices in an elaborately composed ritual. The most interesting thing here was perhaps to watch the locals picking walnuts from the trees in the park.
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