The Beijing Zoo is a Dump

Q: What's more depressing than the Beijing Zoo?
A: The Beijing Zoo when its raining!

Oh it feels so good to laugh again! I'm sure the poor animals could go for a laugh right about now, but unfortunately they're too busy fastening nooses out of bamboo grass or whatever the hell the zoo keepers feed them. In all seriousness though, the Beijing Zoo is really one of the most depressing places to go, and clearly didn't receive any of the funding the government doled out to the city to fix it up for the Olympics. I have been to the zoo twice now since getting to China (once in the rain, and the other time as a field trip with my kindergarten class), and each time I leave feeling like shit. How can the management of that place walk through the compound everyday, see all these depressed animals sitting in their old filth, and not even consider spending a bit of money to fix the place up?

Something else that has really bothered me each time I went to the zoo was the way people treated the animals. For instance, I was watching a big majestic Lion in his 10x10 cage (appropriate room dimensions for an animal that typically roams vast plains), when all of a sudden a Chinese guy walks up to the cage and starts clapping and screaming and growling at the animal, trying to get a reaction. Soon a few other Chinese men walked over and started screaming at the Lion, which looked like it just wanted someone to shoot it out of its misery. The zoo security guard just watched the whole thing and did nothing to stop it. I thought back to the Tiger attack that happened last summer, where a Siberian Tiger escaped from her cage and killed one person before getting killed herself. Now I know its tragic that someone was killed, but after seeing all the abuse these animals get, it's no wonder the tiger snapped. I'm sure she's considered a martyr amongst the animal community, someone who finally stood up against all the douches who harass them day in and day out. I would be lying if I told you I didn't want that poor Lion to escape from his cage...

Something else that really bothered me was the blatant disregard for the signs posted throughout the zoo. Is the vast majority of Chinese illiterate, or do they simply not care about signs asking people not to feed the animals, or not to touch the animals? Take a look at the photos to the right- you'll clearly see a sign that says "Do Not Touch," and then a picture of a man clearly touching said animal. If my damn Nokia wasn't so slow, you would have seen that man lift the poor sea turtle's fin out of the water and hold it there for a photo. Once again, the security did nothing to stop this.

I was pretty excited to see the new aquarium, since it is listed as the world's "largest inland aquarium." How did it stack up? Well... its definitely not as nice as the New England Aquarium, and the price tag was a bit high (120 RMB, as opposed to the 20 RMB it costs to go to the zoo), and the highly hyped Whale exhibit actually doesn't house whales... but it actually wasn't that bad. At least the fish weren't all on suicide watch, right?

I guess the main point of this blog is, shame on the Chinese for letting these animals live in these conditions! If one of the prized Pandas is sleeping in his own shit, just imagine what the other animals have to put up with. I don't know whats going to happen here, but something really needs to be done to fix the place up.

China Encourages Littering

So I saw this sign above a window on a train, and I was pretty confused as to what it was trying to tell me. Back in the states, seeing a circle with a line through it means you cannot do whatever is in that circle. If you see a sign with no line through it, that generally means you are allowed, if not encouraged, to do it! So when I see a sign with a man sticking his head out the window, and a bottle being tossed out that same window, what am I supposed to think? Come on China!

Beijing Volunteers are Useless

OK so I'm finally getting around to writing a new blog after a bit of a hiatus. The truth is I've just begun teaching "kindergarteners," which in China means any child between the age of 2 and 4. This of course makes little sense, since at age two these kids can barely speak any Chinese. I'll save my rants on children for later though, since today I'm dedicating my time to how absolutely worthless the Beijing Volunteers have been, and continue to be.

For the Olympic games, the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG) set up a massive campaign to get volunteers for the games. The official website lists that 100,000 volunteers were present for the Olympic games and will be present for the Paralympic games- that means that there have been 100,000 useless idiots roaming the streets for the past month plus. So where is all this hate coming from? Well for one thing, several of my friends and I applied months in advance of the deadline for the volunteer position, since the website had stated its need for foreign volunteers. Now I would think that after requesting foreign volunteers, receiving several applications from a group of American students who had all either majored or minored in Chinese would be just what the recruiters were looking for, especially because this was not a paid job. But no, in typical Chinese fashion, after receiving confirmation that our applications were received, we never received any further notice. I called up friends in China to see if they could reach anybody about the matter, but they were all told by the agency that there were too many applications and it would be impossible to look any individual up in the system.

OK fine, that doesn't make any sense but whatever. For all I know, the entire system crashed and they lost all our applications (this is China after all), but you would expect that there would at least be some foreign volunteers, right? Not that I saw. Beijing is a huge city, so its very possible these people were just in other locations, but I've been here since August 5th, been to an Olympic event, walked around the Birds Nest, the Beijing train station and airport, and been to various other major tourist attractions, but not once did I see any non-Chinese volunteers. OK fine, so what if they're Chinese, at least they can speak English and help anyone with their questions, right? Wrong again! Every time I needed help finding someplace, the volunteers I spoke to spoke absolutely zero English- how convenient! I can at least speak enough Chinese to get my point across, but what about all those foreigners who had traveled to China and desperately needed help getting around?

What bothered me even more is that half the volunteers I spoke to didn't even bother trying to understand the Chinese I was speaking. Something that makes Chinese really hard to learn is that several words are pronounced the same way, but the tone or inflection they are spoken with gives the words a different meaning. For instance, "mǎ" means horse while "mā" means mother. So I could be saying a sentence correctly, but if the tones are off the meaning of the sentence is lost. This is a problem I tend to have, but people can still take the context of the sentence and figure out what word I'm trying to say. If you're fluent in Chinese and are willing to take the time to figure it out, its not that hard. But on the few occasions when I needed help finding things, the volunteers I spoke to couldn't be bothered trying to figure out what words I had mispronounced. If you can't speak English, the least you could do is try to figure out what the hell I'm trying to say. For instance, I went with Estee to try and find a temple- its the only temple in the area, and I kept saying the word for temple properly but because I was mispronouncing the temples actual name they had no idea what I was saying and couldn't help me. How did these people even get hired for this!! What do you actually do? Just because Beijing is hosting the Paralympics doesn't mean you need to hire people with mental handicaps to volunteer! Aren't the volunteers there to help foreigners more than fellow Chinese? If so, learn to communicate with people who can't speak the language!

These clowns are still scattered throughout the streets, sitting around pretending to be helpful volunteers when in fact they are just blocking the sidewalks and replacing all the homeless people the government kicked out. For all intensive purposes, these people are jobless bums, since they spend all day sitting on the street and not attending their real jobs (if they actually have one). You know what would have been a welcoming sight? Some one who could speak English and could actually do their job of helping foreign visitors to Beijing. On the plus side, they do have very snazzy uniforms.