Benassini-Lyons Travels

Regrettably, we bought our plane ticket from Hiroshima to Seoul before we knew that we could have taken a ferry from the Nagasaki area (Fukuoka) to Busan in South Korea - Sigh, it would have been fun to see the sea and then to go overland from the southern edge of Korea up to Seoul. Another time; this time, we took the short flight from Hiroshima to Seoul. Very easy. Mostly.  The immigration folks for South Korea are not joking around but they let us in, slowly and one by one (we had a similar experience getting into Panama, places that have a more intense border have matching, serious-government agents).  Easy train ride to Seoul and we made it to our little apartment which was… a somewhat big  step down from our living situations in Japan.. I spent a lot of time looking for a place in Seoul and this place was on the cheaper end (but not cheap, still more than $150 a night).  Ah, getting to the apartment reminded me we are not in the special place that is Japan anym...

Generally, I'm not a fan of zoos. I remember visiting the San Francisco zoo in about 2002  and watching the polar bears pacing back and forth, back and forth, all day long in their rather small concrete pens and thinking that this is no way for an animal to live. But there are two purposes for which they are very well-suited, of course--preserving endangered animals and providing opportunities for kids and others to see animals that they would not otherwise have the chance to observe. The Taipei zoo was on our planned itinerary mostly for the pandas. There are about 1800 wild pandas left and approximately 300 in captivity. Those are pretty small numbers, and the only pandas in the US currently are in Atlanta. So we planned from the beginning to go to see them in Taipei. On Monday, we took the tram out to the zoo, bought our tickets, walked over to the panda house and discovered that it is closed on the first Monday of every month! Arrgh! That gave us the opportunity to visit t...