Panda Day!!

The Internet is crazy here so these pictures are posting out of order and in odd places. Hopefully this will work. I always type as we go along in the bus and take down thoughts and what the local guide says. 

Cloudy here some today. It is always cloudy here with only 70 sunny days a year in Chengdu. 70!! Can you imagine? The sun came out at noon so we got to have some sun here, too. Maybe we were good luck!!  Susan said this city is more laid back and known for being lazy. It is known for agriculture. It is also the "home of the iPad" 

It is only about 70-75 degrees here today. Woohoo!!!! That is good weather for seeing the pandas. We boarded our bus with the local guide at 7:30am to head to the Panda Reserve.  There are only 2000 pandas in the world. 80% of pandas are in this province of Sichuan. Bamboo grows in humid weather and that is found in this area. Pandas are picky and like only 25 types of bamboo. A panda spends 50%of their time eating. 

Adult pandas weigh more than 100 kilos. Pandas are pregnant for 3-5 months. 45% they will have twins, but can only keep one since they cannot care for two babies. The first year panda babies only drink milk and then they move onto bamboo shoots. Pandas cannot eat meat at all. Only a few wild pandas eat meat. In captivity, pandas only eat bamboo or bamboo cake. Pandas are a "living fossil" as they have lived on earth for more than 80,000 years. 

Pandas are Endangered because of the food, breeding and because the babies have a hard time surviving. They are a solitary creatures and have a hard time finding other pandas in the wild. They only have a one week to breed in the wild. 

We were supposed to go to the most famous panda park but the pandas there had some type of highly contagious disease. So we are headed to a different area. 

We saw red pandas, too. Red pandas belong to a different family. They eat birds eggs, insects and bamboo shoots in the wild. In captivity they eat bamboo and bamboo cake. 

Anna saved her money for about a year and money given to her to be able to hold the panda today. She was in heaven. It was a very quick moment, but the memory will last a lifetime. As she sat down the panda kind of reached over and put his arm around her. 

We went to a beautiful place for lunch. 

We walked around JinLi street after lunch.  It was really neat. Pretty busy, as today is a weekend and a The Dragon Boat Festival Holiday here. This area is very pretty. It is a beautiful city.