Last day in Wuhan

June 4, 2007 Monday

Our last day in Wuhan. In the morning we went to the Yellow Crane Temple. This was in a very large park with many buildings. After climbing the requisite 10 flights, we arrived at the main pagoda. It had a lovely tile painting with the yellow crane:

How did they get the old guy in the wheelchair up to this? Chuck wasn’t going to climb any higher! THEY HAD AN ELEVATOR!!! We took it to the top and had this lovely view:

Went back to the department store near the campus (I was very proud of myself. I gave the driver the card to get back to the campus and then managed to get him to stop and let us out when we got to this store.) We had dumplings for lunch at the food court and then went back to the shoe store so that I could get another pair of sandals.

Walked over to the Physics building to say goodbye to Xiaoyan. We wanted to visit the zoo. (Our first choice had been Mao’s villa, but no one seemed to know what to write for the taxi driver.) Luckily Xiaoyan was with us when we flagged down the first taxi, because we would never have known what was going on. He was an odd number license plate. Because it was the 4^th, only even numbers could go across the bridge. Spotted an even and were on our way.

This was a terribly sad zoo. It had a lovely location on a big lake. It had several small lakes within the grounds. The animals were in teeny tiny cages with so many bars that you could barely see them.


They had no space and nothing to do. The panda was sick. Its keeper came out to look at it while we were there and then came to talk to us. He said, “She is ill.”

She was laying there making ou, ou sounds.

They did have two cute baby camels. But they didn't have much space either, so they only ate and didn't run around like the one in Hefei.

We went for dinner to a place that has special crab dumplings. (2 flights) Xiaoyan had written down the crab dumplings for us. We managed to order fish and vegetable from a menu with only words.

Tired out we found an even number cab to go back to our room. On the way we saw a police car with a bust of Mao on the dashboard. Both Xiaoyan and Feng had gone to Beijing. They needed to get their visas for Slovakia and the only consulate was in Beijing and only open 2 days a week. We will see them there.

12 flights