Taipei Zoo

In looking through the tourist brochure for Taipei, I saw there was a zoo, and that it was easily accessible via the subway. I decided I would go to the zoo during the day before I went on my Taipei Night Tour a couple days after I got to the city. When I read the brochure, it told me that the zoo was open from something like 9 to 5, and that they stopped taking visitors at 4:30. This led me to believe that the zoo was small. I was wrong.

The Taipei Zoo is the biggest zoo in Asia, as I read on a sign when I was there. I wish the brochure had mentioned this. I had taken to getting up not very early in the morning, and lazing about (it was a vacation, after all, and I'd just finished my teaching contract) for a couple hours before venturing out. So I didn't get to the zoo until maybe noontime, and I knew I had to leave around 4:00 to make sure and be back in time for my tour that evening. Luckily, the entrance fee was very cheap--about US$2. It took me a while to realize just how big the zoo was, because the signage wasn't that great at the entrance--it really seemed pretty small and hokey. So I wasted a lot of time looking at farm animals and bored monkeys in the beginning.

Sorry, the pictures are all out of order and screwed up because of transferring from my memory card to a computer that belonged to this lady from London I met at the hostel, and because this stupid website now only allows for one photo to be uploaded at a time, and it doesn't necessarily put them at the end each time. I've always had a problem with Blogger's photo uploading impotence, but this beats all now.

As you can imagine, a lot of these photos will be taken through glass. This one looks kind of like a painting.

Not a real cow.

The koalas were not very cooperative.

Once I got to the panda house, it started getting cool. Because the pandas are so popular, of course they had their own whole building, where you go up a ramp with a lot of panda info to get to the viewing area.

There were statues outside the building, and a lot of provisions for extremely long lines. Luckily I went on a weekday, so there was no line outside, just a short one inside that went fast.

Pandas. I think they are Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan:

I don't know which one this is, but he did not face the audience the whole time I was there.

Not real pandas.

Panda poop.

This is one of the gift shops, but it didn't have a lot of panda stuff in it. I just liked the big woolly mammoth. In one of the other gift shops I bought a bunch of panda stuff as gifts and for myself. Pandas are cute.

Find the owl:

Sloth.

All the videos get uploaded to the end of the blog, and it's getting late, so I'm not going to maneuver them around at this point. Anyway, I missed a ton of the Australian and African animals, though I did get to see some very cute kangaroos and wallabies. And lots of other animals. No lions. It was fun. If I go to Taipei again, which I plan to do because I plan to eventually teach in Taiwan, I'll go back and do the whole zoo.