After seeing the alligators, I took a quick potty brake. It was a mistake. This is when I wished I could wear a diaper! Those brown spots are poop. While Bruce waited for me outside, a 10-year-old Chinese girl dropped her pants, squatted and, started peeing on the patio outside the woman's bathroom (just a few feet away from the men's room, and in plain sight of everyone). This is perfectly normal in China.

What would have been my dad's favorite part was the birds. We saw albino peacocks! There were nice looking finches (I think they were finches), and parrots.

Bears were next on the wild life path. Their cages were mostly empty. It was hard on our hearts to see their living conditions. At the same time, it was amazing to see a frizzly up close! I knew they could get big, but holy cow!! I didn't see as much of the pandas as I wanted too, but Bruce had a mission . . .

Pictures from the Buddhist Temple

1,611 Stairs

It is May Holiday!! Kelly, our native coordinator, said that since the Chinese don't have weekends, they take a lot of holidays. But this holiday is celebrated around the world. It is known as May Day! To kick off our May Day celebration on Thursday, and because we thought we'd have the day off, we watched a movie with our kids. We showed the kids "Kung Fu Panda." They loved it! I have NEVER seen them so well behaved. I think the candy we bribed them with helped too. It was nice to be with all of them and not have to be getting after them. I felt like we bonded a little more.

Today we woke up early to enjoy a yummy America tradtion. We went to Mai Dong Lao (McDonald's in Chinese). Then we got in a taxi to visit a pagoda we see almost every Sunday. We called Tim to tell the taxi driver where we wanted to go. Somewhere the translation got mixed up and we ended up at the newly built Buddhist temple. It was a good mix up. This was traditional Chinese culture, and it was beautifully built. We bought our tickets, and started hiking up the mountainside. It was just like the part on Kung Fu Panda where he tries to climb all the steps on the mountain to reach the temple and watch the fight.

To give you an idea of how crazy the hike was, imagine how many steps (actual stairs) you climb in a day. 20 steps make a story. Probably you go up and down the ones in your house three or four times, plus a couple of curb sides, and maybe a couple of ten-stair sets leading up to buildings and rich people's houses. That gives you about 85 stair steps. We hiked up over 1,600 stairs, then turned around, and hiked back down all 1,600. I painstakingly counted them one at a time. Bruce nonchalantly counted them two at a time, skipping down the mountain, and almost had a accident.

There were crazy large temples, and we got pictures of them. There were dozens of HUGE jade statues, and a giant fountain shooting water in different patterns. At the top there were real Chinese monks with their hair long and tied up in a funny bun, and they would let you bow down and pray to their statues if you wanted to (and also drop some money in a box). We chose not to. To our surprise, there were thousands of fake Chinese dollars and paper coins scattered all up and down the mountain, pinned down with rocks. It's like monopoly money that they leave for the gods or their deceased relatives, to use as money in the afterlife. They also leave real fruit for the statues on platters, for them to eat in the afterlife. The whole trip was pretty fun and interesting.

Theena Had Kittens!!

This post is like a week overdue, but . . . Theena, the ally cat our group adopted, had her kittens. She had a black one, an orange one, and a gray black and white one. They are sooo cute! Despite being the first born, the gray one wouldn't nurse for the first few hours. We weren't sure if it was going to live. Sometimes, when a mama cat knows that a kitten won't make it, she abandons it. After a many attempts to feed it through a syringe, and shoving it up to the nipple, it finally got the idea. It is now healthy and happy. They haven't opened their eyes yet. Here are a few pictures.