Visit a panda sanctuary in China

“After filling out a few waivers (see above point) and changing into uniforms, our small group of volunteers and translators were led to a panda enclosure for our first task: cleaning. The pandas were ushered inside, and we volunteers went to work sweeping the outdoor space and scooping up their massive chunks of panda poo, which surprisingly weren’t smelly at all. The most physical aspect came with splitting bamboo for the pandas, aka slamming the giant bamboo stalks against the floor until they split into pieces. Then we switched places with the pandas and mopped the indoor enclosure while the pandas watched us and munched on their bite-sized bamboo snacks.”

“My friends from Israel and Canada, who had visited the Pandas the days before told me about how the bears were playing around and how active they were. Well I guess they must have been tired from the previous days, because most of them barely moved. All we saw them doing was sleeping and eating and one of the pandas came down from his tree house, because one of the staff people poked him in his behind for about 15 minutes to get him to move.”