We got the to Shaanxi Wild Animals Rescue and Research Center yesterday. The pandas are so cute...they are so fat and lazy. All they do is eat, poop, and sleep all day long. It's a nice life to have, especially when you have someone cleaning after you! :) I am responsible for taking care of two pandas...Shan Shan and Zhu Zhu. Shan Shan isn't very smart..they think something might be wrong with her mentally. Zhu Zhu on the other hand is very clever...and aggressive. If she doesn't get her food in a timely manner, she gets upset and starts climbing around on the cage. Each volunteer is responsible for helping the panda keeper feed the pandas and clean the panda cages (i.e. clean up bamboo and poop). Cleaning up the poop isn't as bad as I thought. There's no smell to it since it's mostly just bamboo and you can see the bamboo in the poop.
Since Zhu Zhu is so smart, she poops only in the corner...so it's much easier to clean. She had about 7kg of poop this morning!!! Shan Shan on the other hand pooped all over her cage and had about 8kg of poop. I was surprised how much they pooped overnight!!! We just use a shovel and broom to clean the poop (and they gave us coats and gloves)...so you don't really get dirty.
Zhu Zhu was artifically inseminated this past Spring...so they think she might be pregnant. They moved her to a different panda house this morning in anticipation of the birth. There's no sure way to tell whether she is pregnant...I asked if the ultrasound works, but they said not really. The panda keeper was also telling me the story about how she escaped in the spring one evening. The zoo keeper saw a panda walking around the gardens and called all the panda keepers to see which panda was missing. My panda keeper was able to call Zhu Zhu back and she followed...see how smart she is!!!
There are 3 baby pandas (though not really babies...they are 2-3 years old). They are housed separately and are even cuter than the adult pandas. I forget all their names, but one of the other volunteers is responsible for taking care of them.
OK..enough about pandas and their poopies. There are also some other animals at the rescue center. We saw some golden monkeys, peacocks, red pandas (these are so cute too!), black bears, and a leopard. The leopard was so mean and vicious...he just kept growling at us from his cage...I'm sure we looked delicious to him...thank goodness he couldn't get to us!! There is also a baby black bear that was just playing around yesterday. Since he's still a baby, they let him run around loose and we can play with him. He's so adorable...and he loves playing and climbing on the trees.
There's not much to do here after work since we live within the center. I brought my Carmen Electra Striptease DVDs and we all learned the hip hop video yesterday. It was so funny...even the male volunteer (Patrick) was doing it with us. We had alot of fun entertaining ourselves with it.
As much fun as it is to see the pandas...the accomodations are terrible. I'm ok with having bugs and mosquitoes outside the house (and maybe a few inside the house), but when they are my roommates..then I have a problem. I had a huge grasshopper on my bed, bugs on my comforter, mosquitoes in the room, etc. And I even had some bugs spying on me while I was showering. The bathrooms scare me...the water is always yellow in the toilet no matter how much you flush it...and it looks like seaweed or something is growing inside it. Trust me when I say it's nasty. This is worst than my hotel room in Kratie and remember, I didn't shower while I was there that one night. Obviously, I had to shower yesterday since I didn't think I could go a whole week without showering. :)
Patrick is thinking of leaving and returning to Xi'an to do the other volunteer work. He wasn't able to sleep last night and was using raid all night on the bugs. There was also a roach on his bed. I slept with the comforter over me for most of the night..so if something got me...it would've already been inside my comforter. If he leaves, I'll most likely leave with him...I don't want to get eaten alive by the bugs!!! Cleaning panda poopie is one thing, but fighting bugs in the night is another!!!
