Animal Prison/Hey, There's A Person In That Tank!

We did SO MUCH tourist stuff this weekend! Tuesday we went to the Beijing Zoo with Bella and Cherry. When you walk into the zoo it looks like this:

Doesn't it look like it's going to be just the most beautiful place ever? We were so excited because it was such a pretty beginning, we couldn't imagine what the rest of the zoo might hold.
Before embarking on our adventure, we decided to help this little guy out of his shell...

We came across some zebras who were pretty much domesticated. They could come right up to the fence and people were feeding them all sorts of things - lettuce, peach pits, apples, etc. I can't imagine this was very good for the zebras, even though it was kinda cool to pet a real live zebra......

 This little guy and his friend were too cute to just not take a picture of.....

haha what a cheeseball

Something that I love about China is how close friends are. The girls link arms or hold hands when they are out together and it's such a simple show of affection between friends....I love it. Chelsie's mom put it best when she said "Remember when you were little and you would hold your friend's hand? And then when do you stop doing that, when is it not okay anymore? They just never stop doing it here...." I'm glad that they don't.

I didn't take very many pictures of the animals because they were just so sad. They were all laying down like they were depressed or trying to eat the walls of their cages because they were so disturbed. The rhino was missing his horn. The tigers were in cages the size of circus cages. The only animals that were even somewhat happy were the pandas, and that's because this is a zoo built specifically to showcase pandas...

After walking through the whole zoo, we were feeling very sad and very ready to head to the aquarium, which was supposed to be really good. It's also the largest indoor aquarium in the world! I knew it was going to be fun when we walked in and immediately were greeted with this lovely display of ChEnglish: 

I don't think many of the pictures really need explaining other than a few, and that's what captions are for......soooooo enjoy!

This thing looked prehistoric, I've never seen anything like it before

China is obsessed with entertaining their children

Seems an appropriate place for a bear statue....

For those of you coming to visit me here in China, I will not be going to the zoo with you. It was too depressing and horrific. I will gladly take you to the aquarium though, and we can go to the dolphin show that is entirely in Chinese and yet still awesome.