New Video: 5 Springs Mountain and Zoo!

As promised, new video post=new blog post. Here is a video from me visiting Lanzhou's 5 Springs Mountain, also known as 五泉山.



The mountain is located in the South Central part of Lanzhou and it has a fantastic view of the city and its surrounding mountains. One thing I didn't expect to see on a trip to a mountain was a zoo! For a city like Lanzhou (equate Lanzhou to Midland/Odessa, Texas....it is a relatively remote desert industrial town), the Lanzhou had a lot of animals in their zoo! Birds and all kinds of animals from all over the world, not just Asia! Zebras, lions, red pandas, vultures, leopards, all kinds of stuff!

However....

Zoos in China are a little depressing compared to America - animals, for the most part just sleep because the majority of them are in concrete enclosures with no companions and no grass and no...toys or anything for them to kill time. So basically they just sleep and sleep and are very bored. It's actually kind of sad. Zoos in America are very natural and the animals are pretty content, I think mostly because our animal protection laws are so strict. In China, it's not so strict. Except for pandas, who get the royal treatment, the animals just seem sad. I just didn't want to take video of it. I do have this one picture of their Sika deer:

After you get through the zoo, you're pretty much 1/3 of the way up the mountain, so you can just follow a cut out pathway and climb the stairs all the way to the top. It'll take maybe an hour and it's fairly steep, so you'll be tired, but the view is definitely worth it!

Yeah, Chinese cities are much different than American cities. They're much more dense and just in general seem to be devoid of a lot of color. When I was out driving today around Tyler, I was just overwhelmed by how open everything is - you can see a lot of the sky, there are trees everywhere, it's just so different....not skyscrapers as far as you can see.

In Tyler, Texas, there are no overly clogged roads due to unexpandable roads and overly compact cities. There's no constant cloud of pollution creating that blue-ish grey haze that you see every single day.

Just different.

Now remember - I said at least 3 posts a week until I had everything put up from the trip! So keep coming back!