Panda !

We went early morning to visit the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in Chengdu, and we enjoyed the sight of those lazy @#$es eating bamboo all day and their cuuuuuuuute babies playing around. Evgeni couldn't resist and payed what was needed to hold a baby in his arms (and get pictured doing it).



Let me badmouth pandas a bit. It has the stomach like other bears, made to digest meat. However it is lazy, really lazy, but very clever : meat runs bamboo doesn't let's eat bamboo. However because bamboo is not meat it only digests 3% of it. Solution ? Eat more bamboo, up to 15kg a day, and save energy as much as possible by having 12 hours a day of naps. So you would think that this explains why it is disappearing ? Nahhh, on the 1000 kinds of bamboo it accepts to eat 25. And as if being picky about food wasn't enough, it's picky about girls. Giant Pandas have really hard time finding the perfect partner. "Enough", I hear you say, well that's not all, baby pandas are born half developped (premature compared to most mammals), and that 200g thing is very fragile, so fragile that barely half survive even with an army of chinese doctor watching them. Finally mothers have pretty low maternal instinct and it usually takes them a few babies to figure what to do with it. So now you understand why it's disappearing (ok I agree that overpopulation in China is kinda helping as well). But it's so CUUUUUUUUUUTE !



We spent the rest of the day visiting the science and industry museum and the "computer street" (Akihabara or Mongallet in Chengdu).



I spent all the evening at the hostel drinking beer listening to an old french routard playing with a guitar and singing all the classic french songs (From Brel to Noir Desir with a lot of Renaud and Brassens). A young french couple joined us and we chatted all night :). It felt good.