Finally we were ready to go to the zoo, but as usual, the top priority was food (those Singaporeans sure do love to eat!). We went to a restaurant across the street where I almost died. Well, perhaps died is a bit strong, but at least I started to get sick after seeing the menu. In fact, if we hadn’t gone to dinner the previous night where the chicken was served with the head still attached, I would have thrown up while reading this menu. I assure you I’m not joking. This menu was kind enough to have the description with the dish and very nice pictures to the side so you can see exactly what you’re ordering. Yup, that meant I got to see pictures of the pigeon dishes, cut chicken (feet and head included), pig intestine, suckling pig (where they cook a baby pig and it comes to you still looking like a baby pig on your food dish), even foi gras and shark fin soup! So I let them do the food ordering and just focus on not throwing up. They were kind enough to not order anything of those truly bizarre dishes and I ended up eating some pretty good sweet and sour pork and white rice.
We depart the restaurant and our adventure begins! Before going to dinner we talked to the people at the desk of the hotel to ask them how to get to the zoo and they told us to get on the 226 bus. OK, not that hard. So we cross the street to the bus stops when we discover that none of them are stops for the 226 bus. So we did what any intelligent traveler would do – we began to walk around trying to find the bus stop instead of asking for directions. We managed to walk several city blocks searching every bus stop we could see, and we even saw several 226 busses driving and tired to follow them, but we could never figure out where they stopped. We eventually asked locals for directions to the bus stop, but all three people we asked were somewhat rude and wouldn’t help us. So we keep following the bus and wind up right back at the hotel – this was clearly not working. So 45 minutes have passed and we’re no close to finding the stop. We keep following the 226 busses we see driving past us but still can’t find the stop, so we eventually ask a policeman standing on the street and he tells us the stop is about 20 meter away. So what have we learned from this you might ask? Get a map before you go trying to find bus stops.
So here we are at the bus stop after over an hour of searching and we wait for the bus. And we wait. Then we wait some more. This is followed by some more waiting. By now we’re been waiting for 20 minutes now and still no 226 bus, but we’ve seen all the other busses that stop at this place multiple times. In fact, I am going to digress for a moment. The entire time we’ve been in Guangzhou I’ve seen exactly three other white people. Three. So, I thought it was bad in Hong Kong when I’d occasionally get a few stares on the MTR, but this was SO much worse. I’d been able to ignore it and not think about it up until this point, but I noticed something curious while waiting for the bus. Whenever a bus would drive up and stop in front of us I saw most of the people in the bus glance over at me, but only a few would stare. But, the second the bus began pulling away the entire side of the bus would turn their heads in unison and just stare at me as it pulled away. I’m not joking and I’m not exaggerating either – it was pretty creepy. People walking on the other side of the street also watched me as they walked along and any babies walking by would stare even more. The entire time I felt like I was a bacteria in a laboratory under a microscope with someone watching my every move. Pretty awkward to say the least.
So, over 30 minutes have gone by now and still no 226 bus. Just our luck. We decide to wait another 10 minutes and then leave if the bus still hasn’t arrived. So, about 9 minutes go by and we’re about to leave when miraculously the bus arrives. We’re finally off to the zoo!
The bus then took about half an hour of driving through the city before we arrive at a bus depot. A bus depot??? What happened to the zoo? Apparently, our conversation at the hotel had gone something like this (although it was spoken in mandarin):
us: May i know how we can get to the “dong wu yuan” (that means zoo) ?
hotel: Oh, just take bus 221 from the bus stop outside the hotel and you will reach there is about one hour plus.
us: Is there any METRO stations near it?
hotel: no, you can only take a cab or bus.
us: Thanks, just to confirm, this is the one? (while pointing at the places of interest map)
hotel: yes yes.
us: wow… its more simple than we thought!
Turns out that the name of this bus interchange and the zoo are almost identical and so they gave us the wrong directions (you’d think they would have figured out we wanted the zoo based on the fact that we were pointing to the ZOO the whole time on the map). In our first bit of good luck since the day began, there was another bus at the interchange that was leaving right then for the zoo so we hopped on. Unfortunately, this bus took almost an hour to get us to the zoo, but we arrived nevertheless! So, after over two and a half hours of traveling we got to the zoo!
You can see the "Dongwuyuan" in the name
The zoo was huge, just like any American zoo I’ve been to. We bought out tickets and went in, deciding to come back to the safari and try and see the tiger show first. When I said that the zoo was huge, I meant it. It took us almost 15 minutes of close to running speeds to arrive at the show just after it started, including running through the crowds for the last couple hundred meters.
*If the video does not show on facebook, please go to the actual blog page to see it.
The tiger show was really cool and there are some videos for you. After the tiger show we saw an elephant show, pandas, animals from Australia, and then headed back to the safari.
Baby Hippo!
Baby White Tigers!!! I really liked these guys.
To our immense disappointment, when we arrived the safari was closed when we got back there. So, it was dusk at this point and we began wondering around the zoo to see as many animals as we could before they kicked us out. We ended up wondering further into the zoo until it was very dark as we tried to find an exit. After walking along a path to the exit for about 20 minutes a golf kart thing came by to drive us, which we were happy about and had been waiting for one to pick us up for the past half hour. So, it starts to drive and gets about 200 meters before it turns sharply and stops. We’re at the exit. Ok, so our ride wasn’t quite as much fun as we hoped. We then exited and crammed onto a bus to take us to the metro station and went back to the hotel. Oh, and the entire ride back took about 20 minutes by subway.
For dinner we found a KFC (much to my happiness) and had dinner. Although the popcorn chicken there didn’t taste as good as in the US, I did learn that if you just point to picture menus you can always order the food you want. We then returned to our hotel rooms and watched a Hong Kong movie on TV which was really good. After the movie they asked me if I wanted to go to a club or bar with them. Now, as you know I don’t drink and I’m amazingly awkward if you try to get me to dance, coupled with the fact that I feel like the only white guy in the entire city. In the end, I decided that I would regret it if I didn’t go with them and we left. We just sort of wondered down the street and looked in a couple of clubs, which were amazingly loud and smoky. One in particular I couldn’t hear the guy next to me screaming in my ear and I was coughing because there was so much smoke. All in all a very interesting experience and I’m quite glad I went and got to see what the nightlife was like. After that little adventure we went to McDonald’s for a snack where we had a good discussion about American politics and conspiracy theories. Our conversation continued back in their room where we ventured onto diseases, Chinese medicine, more conspiracy theories, UFOs, technology, ext.
So, my third day in china came to an end, and, most importantly, I learned to be extra careful when asking for directions in other languages.
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