松鼠岛 Squirrel Island

Saturday our weekend excursion consisted of a picnic lunch at a place called 太阳岛, or sun island park. It is a huge park on the other side of the river from the city, probably as big as Central Park in NYC, and its very famous in China. Like all parks in China, its what we would describe as extremely fake or contrived. It is perfectly taken care of with straight or curving rows of flowers, intricately carved hedges and sculptures, pump-run waterfalls, a manmade mountain and lake, etc. I guess I\'ve gotten used to the Chinese idea of going to a \'park\' to enjoy \'nature\' because I really liked the place. We picnicked, tossed a frisbee, kicked a soccer ball around. Unlike many other small parks, you can actually walk on the grass on this one, but of course grass is considered pretty dirty so most Chinese people don\'t.

This was all pretty within my expectations until we started seeing signs for something called squirrel island, or 松鼠岛. At first I thought it would just be a island with big carved squirrels sitting in a contrived forest or it was just a name. But as we got closer I saw the entire place was ringed in a 3 foot high plexiglass wall, and I began to think, that must be to keep the squirrels from escaping.

For those of you who haven\'t been to China, there is a noticeable lack of small critters everywhere. In the cities there are no pigeons, no squirrels and not really any other birds. I think the reasons for this are partly pollution related, partly because people will usually try and catch them for pets, and partly because Mao Zedong promoted a campaign to rid cities of dirty little animals. I\'m not sure how large these effects are, but the result is that seeing squirrels is a novelty.

First, you walk through a ten foot tall and ten foot wide \'stump\' which is really a clever disguise for a large, plexiglas spinning door which is virtually squirrel proof. Then there is a small moat around the island. As we got to the island we saw a group of about 20 people all crouched around, camera\'s poised as two little girls used 20 cent packets of squirrel food to feed some scrawny looking squirrels by hand.

This island was literally packed with squirrels and people loved it. They were snapping pictures left and right, buying more food and gathering in small groups to talk excitedly about the squirrels. I don\'t know how the squirrels were so scrawny (litterally 1/3rd the size of squirrels at Williams) but they were surely incredibly overpopulated and didn\'t have any predators. The signs were also amazing, with english translations consisting of \'no chasing or hitting of squirrels, for your safety\' and \'balmy grass is so green, careful step is so sweet\'

As we were leaving we also walked by a \'deer garden\', which was virtually the same thing. Yes, there were deer walking around and you could buy food to give them and they were being petted, caressed, chased after and photographed by a small horde of people, including us.

For pictures of the excursion, you can see my facebook.com album. I\'m off to study because I haven\'t done any all weekend.