Q and Abe

On the hottest Sunday yet in ShenZhen, we went to the “Safari Zoo” for Will’s birthday.

Snake dance.

Captain rabbit and his friends.

Have you ever been to the Bronx Zoo or another Wildlife Conservation Society approved menagerie? Now imagine the opposite of that. Imagine you can bait wolves with pieces of chicken and any animal can be fed (elephants, giraffes, even ligers). Imagine that people put wild animals on you out of the blue and then chase you down for payment. Imagine a bear riding a motorcycle across a tightrope and the vehicle has a basket tied to it with a performer inside.

Got it?

Cool, welcome to my nightmare and reality for one heat stroke inducing day.

Before the day got too oppressive and we had to throw in the towel we had many opportunities for LOLz and OMGFs.

Hamster babies!

It was about 100 degrees inside.

Making some waves!

For one, Will and Kitty got into a floating hamster wheel and ran around like crazy. We think they probably weren’t able to stop. We weren’t able to stop hahahaing.

One against all.

Head massage.

The second and only other fun part was the petting zoo.

Breakdancing turtle.

Pet the alligators, children.

Mangy but together.

Alpha goat gets the carrot.

Hilariously/predictably, we had no idea what was going on. Only a few things were familiar like feeding goats and ponies. The other parts of this “Children’s Paradise” completely broke our schema of what a child-friendly time is supposed to be. For instance, why are all of these domesticated dogs in captivity? And, what are alligators doing in a petting zoo?! The alligator tank had a plastic otter on top, so, does this mean that these alligators ate the previous otters in this exhibit?

Wolf bait (not the kid, that’s extra $).

Feed wild elephants for 10 RMB.

Hot dog.

After the petting zoo, the place just got too weird for us to attempt to reverse engineer. We mostly just starred at the madness slack-jawed and panting like a wild African dog.

Red panda.

Safety #1.

I’ll eat anything. This looks chill.

Tropical weather = bad for peguins.

Why do they keep them apart?

Thankfully, there was one animal that you couldn’t feed and that was the highly endangered Red Panda. Or rather, they were really hard to reach to feed. All of the animals looked really overheated and pretty soon Abe and I were too. We left just before the “feature show.” We hear we didn’t miss much. PETA should stop bothering people who eat meat or go to kennel shows and get themselves to the ShenZhen “Zoo.”