Welcome to China.  In this remarkable, enormous, profoundly complex, indescribably polluted, yet weirdly beautiful country, one of the great claims to fame is the world’s largest population of panda bears.  Visitors from all over the globe flock to Beijing and Xi’an just to catch a glimpse of these adorable creatures.  When a panda is spotted, tourists crowd around, snapping photos, elbowing for the best angle, hoping to get that adorable panda to look towards them.  We were happily among these camera-weilding tourists.But we were also given the opportunity to experience what the panda must feel like. There are certain places like the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace in Beijing where Chinese people make pilgrimages from the countryside.  Many of these people have saved their whole lives to visit the palaces of the Emperors and are traveling from their homes for the first time.  When they glimpse foreigners, also for the first time, they react like we are real live panda bears right in their midst and they immediately snap pictures of us and with us.As you can tell, we enjoyed being pandas for these occasional shutter bursts.  We are never ones to shy away from cameras and we even picked up the very popular local habit of making a peace sign when posing for pictures (something real pandas haven’t yet mastered).  One particular real panda caught our fancy, a very rare brown panda named Momo. Inspired by our time with the pandas, Finn wrote the following entry, describing our first encounter with actual live pandas at a lonely animal reserve outside Xi’an:

“We went to an animal observatory today where we saw pandas.  The pandas we first saw were in cages and had glum looks on their faces.  My mom’s heart splattered over the cage (not really).  Then we walked to a grassy area were we saw no pandas — then one walked out.  He was an older male, black eyes and soft white fur.  Then we walked over and saw the only brown panda in the world.  He was about two years old and we called him MoMo.  He scratched himself and played with his stomach and exercised.  It was funny.  Then the other panda looked through his gate and him and MoMo looked at each other.  They began a friendship.  Then I realized that they had something like emotions.  MoMo will live forever in our hearts.”

And so begins our adventures in China.