Look, this story isn’t going to be funny There’s absolutely nothing funny about once again paying a bunch of money to wear strange blue coveralls and shovel Asian animal poop (well, the husband landed poop duty each time, clearly I wasn’t actually going to do that part…) But I can’t not post about it because we spent all day hanging out with 20 great pandas in China and have the awesome up close and personal photos to show you. So, forewarned and all that…

[Ed. note: The people with access to cool animals have these things all figured out – charge folks money to come, get their hands dirty, shovel poop, give the animals a bath, clean the cages and living areas, and in return those poor schmucks can take some photos and whatnot. That’s right, for the second time this trip, I was paying money to shovel animal poop. I was on Panda Poop Patrol. 

Whatever. I got to cuddle, feed, and hang out with pandas all morning.]

Our morning started ridiculously early…or basically the night before with no sleep. Since Chengdu has no zoning laws, the demolition of the building outside our hotel room window lasted well beyond 2 am…and the with a hotel named the Buddha Zen we weren’t quite feeling the sea of tranquility we anticipated. [Ed. note: there was no Zen. At all.] But, there were pandas in our future so we caught a nap in the car on the couple hour trek north of the city and prepped ourselves for yet another super cool and extremely rare behind the scenes animal encounter.

The pandas did not disappoint. The fact that we got merged into a group with 20 high school students from South Korea kind of did…

We went into the cages…after the giant pandas went out (much to my husband’s displeasure), and were handed shovels and brooms to clean the old bamboo away. Seizing my position of seniority, I nominated myself as the overseer and told the 16 year old boys to go scoop poop…leaving my husband the much cleaner and easier task of sweeping. He picked up a shovel. He picked up a shovel and spent 15 minutes walking every inch of that enclosure with a dustpan in tow looking for the poop. And when a high school boy came to take over, my husband sent the kid away to sweep! Yes, the same husband who fled the room each time our baby niece needed a diaper change was now paying for the privilege of handling the much larger and less contained panda poop. Seriously?! [Ed. note: yes seriously. Pandas are awesome, so I’ll do whatever I need to do in order to hand feed and cuddle them.]

The day got better. We fed pandas. (By hand, because that sounds almost as safe as those tigers and the whole chicken incident.) We got to play hulk smash breaking up the bamboo to fill the cages…and then tease the small Asian high school boys, because I could break the bamboo in one try and so could their small Asian female classmates, but they failed to master this essential life skill.

And then came the highlight. A little one year old panda was lured from her enclosure with large carrot sticks and climbed up on a bench. And one by one, we were given 20 seconds to plop down beside her and cuddle while our partner took photos. She was adorably soft and my photo session went off without a hitch. My husband passed me the big camera and rushed to take his spot next. I took one photo, then another, then the panda turned away, so I sidestepped to keep her face in frame…and tripped over the camera strap…but I didn’t drop the exceptionally expensive piece of equipment my husband only started letting me use unsupervised the trip prior! I kept taking pictures until his 20 seconds were up and then we walked off to enjoy our shots…and they were all black. I have no idea how it even happened, but something on the settings changed when I tripped and suddenly the 15 pictures I thought were solid were black…

Minor panic, because along with paying money to clean up after these creatures [Ed. note: and feed them!!!], we had to pay even more money for those 20 brief seconds of cuddle time – and I was not having his only memory of this day be pooper scooping, no matter how much he seemed to enjoy that activity. I put on my sad face and walked up to the trainer with the black photos on the display. I cycled through them and after much was said back and forth in Chinese, my husband was ushered forward for 10 bonus seconds cuddling a panda toddler. Day saved…by me.