Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 12

This week's blog is about the Shanghai Natural Wild Insect Kingdom (or the Insect Museum for short) in Shanghai. It is about 2 years old and located a few blocks from the apartment on the PuDong side of Shanghai. They don't have English on their website, but a rough translation of the site says that they have over 5,000 square meeters which is split into several sections.

The first section that you go into, they have a bunch of fish swimming around in a couple streams that weave around the first room. You can buy food and feed them, and as they are properly trained to (it would seem), they swarm around when people walk by and they think they may get fed.

A little green frog hiding in the leaves.

There was this really nice snake, which was quite large. I had to put my hand down there to give some reference point since I knew in pictures, you wouldn't be able to tell a huge snake from a tiny snake.

I don't quite know how they picked what animals they had in this "kingdom" and what animals they didn't. There are definately more than insects here, and also more than insects and reptiles. Here are some cute little guys that were hanging out. There were about 10 of them total.

A couple more snakes.

Tom seemed to be quite obsessed with this guy ... well .. actually all 20 or so of them that were there. It is a Dorcus Titanus Titanus (yes, it is SO big that it had the Titanus part twice in the name according to the plaque). They grow to be 40-90 mm long.

This was a hard picture to really get a good one of, but they had this section with Walking Sticks, hundreds of them! You can kinda see the them on the glass, but I wasn't able to really get a good picture that showed how many were really there.

In another case, they had these massive Walking Sticks, some longer than my hand.

I've seen these in a few places, but the Chinese seem to like to put crickets and grasshoppers in little cages. Here they are in glass containers, but you can go to some outdoor markets and they have them in tiny little cages like bamboo bird cages.

So here is a test ... can you find the insect in this picture? Look hard! No, it isn't another Walking Stick looking like a branch.

Still having a problem finding it? Here is another angle of the same insect.

So here is a closeup of the feet hoding onto the branch. If you scroll up and take another look, in the first picture, it is the "leaf" that is prominently featured in the middle of the photo. Talk about good camouflage.

This is a Blatta Giganteus, found in Africa .... a cockroach that was about 3 inches long!

Here is another well-camouflaged bug .. here a bunch of black bugs with white dots on their back. The 2nd picture shows a close-up. This is a Eye Shield Bug from South Africa ... a carnivorous insect that feels on small insects. They live in groups in dry conditions.

A scorpion ...

and a few tarantulas...

Again, here I had a hard time with understanding the concept of the museum, since here was a display case with JellyFish, although quite cute JellyFish.

Then we went (obviously) through the frog and toad area

And then more confusion as I got to the "petting zoo" area. For 2 yuan (about 30 cents), you could get this little container of grass that you could then feed to a few animals that were there. The most popular (and biggest eater of the bunch) was this single little white goat.

They also had an owl, although he didn't seem to want to be petted.

Then a set of what looked like guinea pigs.

And we saw the one and ONLY one squirrel in all of China, we think! Even when you go to parks, you NEVER see a squirrel. Quite odd to us, but here they have 1 little solitary squirrel.

Then came the reptile section, which lots of lizards and iguanas.

It is probably hard to see, but this one is shedding.

This one seemed to be hamming it up for the camera, almost like he knew what one was.

And then there was this guy .... snoozing his little life way on top of the lamp.

I also got my first Chinese foot massage this week. The place that I went, a couple blocks from my hotel in Beijing, had a 90-minute foot massage for what ended up being around $22 US dollars. That 90 minutes included an entire hour of soaking, rubbing, prodding, pushing, and smooshing my feet into 100 different forms. Then 15 minutes for massages of both legs and then the final 15 minutes for the back. Definately not a "spa massage" but an interesting experience and definately stress relieving. For only $22, I'm thinking of trying to find time one evening for another one, or adding another $10 or so for an hour-long massage.

Next week will be our weekend trip to Beijing, including the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China.