Wengcheng Park

Our wonderful friend and liaison Jessie has been wanting to take us out for hot pot for a while now. We were finally able to find a time and went with her "sister" (in China, you're closest friends are referred to as your siblings, so it can get confusing) her sister's son and two friends. 

The way hot pot around here works, if you've never been, (and if you have then pish posh guess you can zone out for few minutes) is your start out with the main course in our case it was snakehead fish.

 [little side note for those of you who don't know me, I used to HATE cooked fish and now I actually like it, so this was a big step, but I still HATE shrimp, sorry mom]

After you've finished that, they turn on the burner underneath and add a broth to it. Once it starts boiling, they bring out raw meat (we had mutton) and these veggie almost like a meatloaf balls haha- balls, and some lettuce and spinach. It was SO delicious, it all had a nice flavor because of the fish. Oh, we ate so much...so so much. I felt like this.

Once we were done stuffing our faces, we headed to Wengcheng Park. It's like 4 attractions put in one spot! First off they have a beautiful flower garden area, which is free to walk around and such. In the springtime their peonies bloom and it supposed to be the most beautiful thing ever; maybe we'll have to come back to see it or something :D. Next they have an amusement park with your basic carnival rides. We went on a few which were somewhat over priced, but whatevs. Next they have an ocean park where you have to pay extra- so we didn't go in. And lastly they have the zoo, which we did pay to go into because its pretty cool/depressing. Zoos are different in China, they don't really try to make the habitats look like their surroundings at home. And people can basically throw whatever food they want to the animals because there aren’t really any employees around. At the Macaque exhibit, there was even this poor female mokiki with half of her right cheek hanging off!! It looked fresh too, like she had gotten in a fight with another monkey. The cheek was just hanging there, I tried to find a worker but no one was around. It makes me so sad just thinking about it. It put a real damper on the whole rest of the zoo experience.

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure. I forgot to take pictures at lunch with the hot pot, so I guess we’ll have to go again!! Buahahaha

 Sorry, this is a random picture, but he was so cute!! I had to show you guys. 

at first he was like "你不是我的妈妈"

then he was like "好吧，我会舔你的手"

(I assume he only spoke chinese)

 Beautiful flowers! Its daisy season so we saw a ton of those. They made them into some really cool sculptures too like dragons, fish tigers, and butterflies. 

Here are us with Frank. This is Jessie’s sister’s son haha what a mouthful. He is 12 years old and has pretty good English. He did research on the park so he could be our tour guide!!! So sweet he had like full on notes and had Jessie help him translate them.

This is the ride I went on because I’m too scared to ride an actual rollercoaster. 

I rode it with Jessie’s sweet daughter who doesn’t talk much and the whole ride I couldn’t tell if she was scared or not. She is 5 years old btw- so small right?? 

Here’s me making an awesome face.

all done!

Michael the brave one. I have to tell you, I was kind of worried he might die for a second on this Chinese rollercoaster but he didn’t (obviously) and the ride only lasted like 2.5 secs. Seriously shortest big rollercoaster ride ever.

Happened upon this cluster of old men smoking; it was like they were perfectly positioned for the picture. Love old people.

Me and Jessie's daughter on the carousel. (she has a name... I just can't pronounce it/ spell it)

This is the goddess of the peony. 

cute macaque, no I didn't take a picture of the sad one...it was too sad

squirrel monkeys. All of them have learned to catch food from visitors haha.

pelican?

This bear was so cute- she would just look up and open her mouth and then people would throw carrots in. Thankfully people generally knew to only throw like carrots and vegetables. 

I think she thought my camera was food so she was waiting for me to throw it. 

brown bear catching food.

This one is so chill that when people threw food, it would only eat it if it fell on its like belly ha. 

me about to feed a giraffe-

then I was like- that's a big tongue!

then it got really close to my face, so naturally I made this face. This was after the closeness p.s. 

elephant feeding time! They were so cute and would put their trunks out like a hand saying "c'mon, give me it."

if you weren't careful they'd just grab all the carrots out of the bowl. 

sup big guy!

he was like- move out of the way, you don't have anymore food. 

Their skin was kind of like touching sand paper that had little pokey hairs sticking out of it. It was so cool though..

I could only fit one finger through to "pet" this guy.

I used NO fingers to touch this cat- but we were SO close, cray cray ya'll 

then I went up top- these guys were just pacing in sync back and forth back and forth. 

someone was kind enough to give this teenage (that's what I call the medium sized-not-so-much-a-baby-anymore) cat a bottle to play with! 

They had a white tiger too!!! 

It made me sad that they just live in these concrete enclosures. 

a lion. So close- this aint no zoom pic

and a baby cub- which oddly- wasn't with the lions. he was pacing back and forth too, with the tiger next to him.

Then we did bumper cars!!

Jessie was trying to get a picture but I really couldn't control the car.

some people were out for blood! These two guys just kept bumping so hard. I probably got bumper car whiplash- ha

Um, please just look at how awesome Michael's face looks. I laughed for a good while. Its probably my favorite picture of him

vroooooom

all done! we had a great time :]

on our way out Mickey grabbed me and was wanting me to take a picture- then some Chinese people jumped in with me. After he pulls a tag out of his suit which probably said 10RMB for a picture. But Jessie got mad at him because he didn't tell me first off. blah blah blah