At the Shanghai Zoo

A couple of weeks ago I took the three oldest kids to the zoo in the Hongqiao neighborhood of Shanghai. It was a cool overcast day but not too cold. The zoo is really nice in that it’s a giant park with lots of green space. There were a number of cherry trees blooming which was fantastic. We saw some snakes, zebras, pandas, red pandas, monkeys etc. Pandas are pretty rare outside of China so that was fun for the kids. There are three of them at the Shanghai Zoo. Chinese zoos are funny in that they are a lot looser on the “don’t feed the animals” culture. The signs are there but people tend to ignore them. At the giraffe pen a lady climbed over the fence so she could feed an obliging giraffe some potato chips (see picture). Here's also a picture of one of the many photos the kids are asked to pose in. Ethan, in particular, with his big smile and light blond hair, was better than any giraffe or zebra for many of the people at the zoo.

It was a big place so the kids were pretty tired, but not tired enough to forget that I’d promised them that they could go on the ferris wheel. We had to walk back to get to it. It was big, fully enclosed capsules, sort of like a dingier version of the one at Luna Park in Sydney. After that, we bought some Wall’s ice creams and headed to the car. Jenny had gone with Zach to do some shopping.