PANDAS !!!

I may not be entirely lying if I said that one of my biggest reasons of coming to China was to hug a panda.
(The truth is my reason to come here was to steal a panda but I have realized that is not going to happen).

This national holiday, I traveled to Chengdu with Warren and his parents. Chengdu is where the world's largest panda breeding center is located. They started with 6 pandas and now there are 88 pandas that stay there. They use special panda breeding techniques as they showed us in a documentary. (That documentary in itself was very interesting/funny and I am debating having a post just about that)

Anyway, getting back to PANDAS !

We got to the Panda base at around 8am. It is sort of an exclusive Panda zoo. There are both giant pandas and red pandas as well as the cutest Panda cubs ever. The pandas are lazy. All they did was sit (or sleep) and eat bamboo. No wonder they are going extinct. The most common panda pose was them sitting on their huge behinds, leaning against a tree and munching on bamboo.

Then we walked around to where the panda cubs were. They were the most adorable things ever. They were sleeping in a crib on their pink blanket. It was sometimes hard to figure out what part was their eye and what was their ear as they looked like cute fuzz balls.

After walking around in the bamboo forest, seeing cute pandas and taking a gazillion pictures, it was time to hug a panda. I had to wear gloves and shoe covers before going into the panda enclosure. There was a line of people there. And then the panda arrived ! It sort of waddled halfway and then decided it was tired so just plopped down on the ground. One of the volunteers then picked up the panda and took him to a bench. It was a baby panda, not full grown and hence, could be picked up. To ensure that the panda did not fall asleep/posed for pictures, there was one volunteer whose sole job was to dip bamboo into honey and offer it to the panda. The panda would dutifully chew the bamboo up to the point of where it was dipped in honey and then would promptly throw it away and wait for its next honey dipped bamboo. Still it was the cutest thing ever.

Finally, it was my turn to hug the panda. As soon as I got next to him, the panda had finished munching its honey bamboo and was not paying any attention to the camera/me but wanted more food (disinterested panda in the picture on the left).After the volunteer did his job, the panda was back to pretending to like being hugged, petted and taken pictures with.

I have a ton of panda pictures but won't upload them all. But I ended up buying a panda hat that day which I wore for the next 2 days and pretended that I too was a panda. Albeit one of its kind - a skinny brown panda from India.