Eleri’s Spring school trip is to the Shanghai zoo. It has been a long, wet winter and Spring hasn’t sprung! The forecast for the week was rain every day but Wednesday, the day of the field trip. The week’s forecast was correct. It rain every day, but Wednesday. We had a beautiful day to enjoy the animals at the zoo.

The children were to take photos and get facts about three animals they would like to do further research for a project. However, getting the facts on the animals was not a simple task as many of the signs were in Chinese only. We did get photos. The girls had fun running around the zoo with their cameras.

Snack break was first on the agenda for my group of girls. The bus ride from Jinqiao to Hongqiao in Puxi is over an hour. The girls were hungry as they have snack in the classroom around 9:30am everyday.

After seeing the monkeys, we ran to the gorilla exhibit. Eleri had fun playing with the puzzle post outside.

The girls compared their arm spans to that of a gorilla…it took more than one girl to get the same span.

Eleri compared her hand to the size of a gorilla’s hand.

Next, we stopped by to see the big cats. The girls had more fun taking photos with the statures than the animals. The lions and tigers were all sleeping in the sun – enjoying the sun for the first time in weeks/months. We decided to eat our packed lunches on the benches near the lions. The crew was hungry.

Eleri liked being the map reader. The zoo is a large zoo in the middle of this big City. The map wasn’t the best so we had fun seeing what we found along the way.

We worked our way over to the zebras and giraffes. Eleri decided the zebra would be a good animal for her project since she saw them in South Africa.

The one bad thing about a zoo in China is that the locals feed the animals. This bear is waiting for more bread to be tossed to him. There are signs that say to not feed the animals, but it doesn’t stop anyone.

The girls wanted more statue photos. I laughed and told the girls the next exhibit we need a photo of them with a real animal. The next exhibit was the wolves and they were too far away.

We saw all kinds of animal this day and about half the zoo – the girls had a blast running around together. We met at the entrance at 1:00pm to load back on the buses. It was a lovely day at the zoo with a little sunshine!