Panda mania

We’ve been joined by the Polish team for the Deaf Olympics at our hotel (though the city is spelling it Deaflympics). It was a very full dining room, with blond, athletic people. Our waiter came over and asked us, “Where are they all from, they are so tall!” We couldn’t get Poland across, but he got Eastern Europe.

At night, as we tried to put to bed too overly tired children who were both wailing at having their fun time ended, we could only be grateful that we were unlikely to be waking up the neighbors.

While Roni was off on his bullet train to the south Mom and I got the kids up and out, off to the zoo. Thank goodness for my mother, is all I can say. There is no way that I could have handled the two kids, the two strollers, the backpack, the umbrellas, the water – all the stuff that it seems to take us to get two small boys out into the Taipei heat. At home, it will be slightly more pared down, and J will go back to being a walker – we haven’t used his stroller in almost a year before coming here. But for now, getting into a taxi is not a quick leap from the curb!

The Taipei zoo is great. Not the world’s biggest or best layout, but where else can you spend the day for $1.65 (Mom and the kids were free, though the guard gate “carded” Mom, to her thrill) in a green, entertaining setting. Complete with misters in the trees and juice/tea/water machines every few feet dispensing 30 cent bottles. Plus, we took travel advice and took the shuttle train to the top and so our whole visit was a downwards stroll.

Our first destination, and the highlight, was the Panda exhibit. My mom is crazy for pandas – way back when she visited the first pandas in the U.S., brought to Washington D.C. and she’s liked them ever since. And I know that it is anthropomorphizing, but there is something about those pudgy faces that makes you smile.

They had it set up so that you got a ticket time when you first entered the zoo, so we rushed there to make our time. However, we’d timed the day of our visit perfectly – today is the first Monday that all the schools start up again here, so the zoo was nearly empty after what was apparently a jam packed weekend. There were all the Disney type waiting areas set up with their snaking turns, but today they were unused. We just wandered to the main door and were smiled inside. There is a narrow walkway across the panda enclosure and people are supposed to keep moving to let the people in line behind them to have their chance to see. But as there wasn’t much in the way of lines, we could stay and take lots of pictures. The keepers were setting up large bamboo branches in stands in the floor and pretty soon the pandas lumbered in and started to eat. Camera phones clicking on all sides. We stayed for quite a while, watching them on the far side of the enclosure eating carrots or something large and orange, and then were finally waved out with the group.

But after hitting the panda gift shop, Mom really hadn’t had enough pandas, so we went back to the front door and asked if we could go in again. The lady said sure (or the Mandarin equivalent) so we went in and got to just stand and watch the pandas wallowing in their bamboo and wandering to the ponds for drinks for a very long time. Conservatively, I’d estimate that Mom and I took 50-60 panda pictures, just to make sure that some of them would turn out, taken through the glass. In the evening, Roni was astonished that anyone could need so many pics, but as I may have mentioned, we are pro-panda people. J

We wandered the rest of the zoo, hitting our favorites (the penguin house is a little sad, and I always avoid cat enclosures as they need so much more space than they ever get) like the elephants and zebras. The camera battery eventually died, done in by the pandas, but we had enough cute pics of the kids in sun hats racing or rolling about to mark the occasion. We focused on animals that had air-conditioning as well, so I saw more snakes and lizards than strictly necessary. D eventually faded out, but J stayed awake, probably fueled by his evil plotting against his brother. Sibling rivalry is in full force at the moment! The hotter J gets, the more he becomes sure that D is the source of his problems. A well rested, cool J can tolerate his once-beloved-when-mythical brother. A hot, cranky J is a secret squeezer.

Back at the hotel, I popped the kids in the tub and with grandma in charge, went off in a taxi to find that yarn store the receptionist had written down for me. It was a combo store called MamaBear, with quite a bit of yarn and even more beads. A big set of tables was surrounded by happy women working wire and beads into decorative thingies. The yarn took up several walls and rows and was all in plastic to protect it from the humidity. None of it was from Asia, as far as I could tell, so I ended up with yarn from Spain and Italy, but I’ll still be able to tell the boys that I wove or knit their scarves from yarn from our trip to Taiwan. So my yarn diet needs have been met. (Though there is unlikely to be much knitting, weaving or spinning time in the near future.)

We went just a couple of steps right of our hotel to a Thai restaurant for dinner. D was more interested in stacking the metal water glasses and J with his motorcycle, but the food was good for those of us who focused on it. Roni found us by spotting us through the window just as we were finishing the ice cream course, back from the south where his vendor visit was a little strange but interesting none the same.

We’re all packed up now, as we fly home tomorrow and have to be out of the rooms by noon. We’re definitely ready to get home and get back to whatever the new normal is going to turn out to be. Unfortunately, the non-stop EVA flights to Seattle are night flights, which is great for sleeping kids, but not so great for killing a day when we’re packed, without a hotel room, and feeling a little done.

So, I signed us up for another tour. It’ll kill half the day (see? The tourism excitement is definitely fading!) and we’ll see a part of the northern coast that we didn’t see on the last tour. I’m using these van trips as a way to test the waters for the day when we come back on our own and make our way around the island to really show the boys where they are from. So these are just little tastes to show us good places to go and how things work.