Another Day out

I am really thankful for such a great husband who really knows how to pamper me.. He knows that he has to leave on Sunday for his business 'China tour', so he spent Friday visiting the Chengdu Panda Research center with me. 

A beautiful Panda sculpture

At the Panda Story Cinema, they showed a video on Pandas. And part of it was the reproduction process from mating to giving birth. I was shocked as I watched the video as I was expecting to see a furry creature to pop out of the mother panda but what came out was small and pink and squealing. Here's a similar video I found on YouTube:

If the video doesn't show, you can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/v/LCSuVb90PqU&hl=en&fs=1

The below video shows the growth of a panda bear, from the tiny pink creature to the furry panda bear that we know:

If the video doesn't show, you can watch it  at http://www.youtube.com/v/6hL0x6mWkbg&hl=en&fs=1

Another interesting thing I learned was that because of the low fertility rate, some pandas go through artificial insemination, and when they got pregnant, they don't know what's going on. So when they are ready to give birth, the baby just shoots out from the body and they actually got spooked by the 'thing' that just popped out of their body. It was really education for me.

This is the 1st time that I saw a little red panda. Doesn't it look more like a raccoon than a panda? I was expecting to see an animal that looks like a panda bear but of smaller size... This is what I found on Wikipedia:

The Red Panda, Firefox, or Lesser Panda, or Ailurus fulgens ("shining cat"), is a mostly herbivorous mammal, specialized as a bamboo feeder. It is slightly larger than a domestic cat........

It's really cute and it was feeding time when we arrived there. So you can see these cute animals feeding and then wandering to a nice warm spot to laze after they had enough. More pictures on Facebook.

We went to the Panda bears enclosure next. It's also feeding time for them.. The pandas were so cute when they were eating, they will lie on their lower back and eat. It looks very lazy... One of them seems more inquisitive and kept looking at us.... 

They are just so cute. But I think the weather is quite hot for them so they are all indoors with the aircon on. Not one of the pandas that we saw are outside in their playground, they are all enclosed in the aircon rooms. Except for the red pandas earlier.

Believe it a not, we actually spent 2 hours in the panda research center. Amazing! Of course we were quite hungry after that so we headed to our next tourist destination: The broad and narrow streets（宽窄巷子）: 

It's newly developed and they are still working on it, but there are some eating places and touristy shops opened. It was really novel to eat in a restaurant where the architecture was conserved from ancient times.... More photos on Facebook.