Taipei Zoo and Hookah Cafe

Yesterday I went to Taipei Zoo with one of my gay friends! It was a lot of fun, though the weather was a little bit too warm and sunny for me. The Taipei Zoo is located very near NCCU, and also near Maokong (the cable car works again! But more on that when I actually go in a couple days), so it makes for a very convenient excursion.

We went to the gate to buy tickets, but for some reason they wouldn't sell me a reduced-fare student ticket because, even though I am a student, I am not a "real" student because I study Chinese. Strange. So instead I got to go through the gate and swipe my Taipei Public Transit "Student Easycard" for entry, where I was still charged the reduced student price. Apparently I was enough of a student for the computer :-P.

Our first destination was the Koala Exhibition, where there were a couple of koala bears. Pretty neat, I guess. They weren't moving, though, so for all we knew they could have just put stuffed koalas in the trees and claimed they were real. Then we saw the pandas! Every child's favorite animal (other than the beloved totoro, of course). There were only two, and they were also sleeping.


Panda. Sleeping. How exactly are they useful again?

We stopped by the "Panda Shop", a souvenir shop full of everything panda that could be imagined. There were panda hats, pillows, keychains, sweaters, chairs, and of course giant stuffed pands. And what zoo trip would be complete without hearing Phil Collins' "You'll Be in My Heart", the main promotional song from Disney's Tarzan, playing in a souvenir shop?

We then saw the nocturnal animal hall where we saw one of the rarest and most special animals in the world. That's right, the raccoon. Because raccoons aren't native to Taiwan, most Taiwanese don't know that, in the United States, they're dirty garbage-eating rodents. After this was the tropical animal area. Then the African animal area, complete with lionesses, rhinoceroses, impalas, and various primates.


Our nearest animal relatives!

One of the other exciting attractions is, of course, the elephant. These two elephants put on quite a show for all the spectators, though. While elephant 1 was eating, elephant 2 reached between 1's legs and rubbed back and forth, eliciting laughter among the (mostly female Taiwanese) audience. Such sublime majestic creatures, these!


Bad, naughty elephants.

We decided to go to the reptile and amphibian house as our final stop, then returned to campus. Then: hot pot, my perennial favorite food here! I've already been to about 5 or 6 different hot pot places and the one near NCCU is by far the best. So needless to say, I was quite pleased to return to "Shabu-sen", as it is called [しゃぶ鮮]. Nearly two hours later we returned to the dorm.

But my day was not complete! It turns out that my beloved flame dame is not leaving until midnight tonight (Friday), so she suggested a trip to a hookah cafe. Most of you in Chapel Hill probably already know what hookah is, but for those of you who don't, it is tobacco that has been flavored, often with honey and fruit. It is smoked through a tube, which draws the smoke through some water, thus filtering it and making the smoke less irritating. I had never smoked a hookah before, so I thought it would be interesting to try it, and it was really neat. Before we left the hookah cafe, I was already able to blow smoke rings (like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland), causing my flame dame to be quite jealous. And that ends my yesterday. More news and pictures soon!