I saw the world was divided into two groups: there are people who cause problems, and there are people who solve problems.
Samuel Weiss
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Giant Pandas
My experience this month was to go to the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base outside the Chinese city of ChengDu. The facility is home to over 50 giant pandas. It also has detailed exhibits on panda evolution, habits, and conservation efforts as well as an artificial lake, tea house, and gift shop. Once a fierce carnivoir, the Giant Panda evolved into a mostly peace loving eater of bamboo leaves. First made known in the West in 1869 by a French missionary, the Panda’s choice of diet require it spend most of its day and night sleeping waking up only long enough to chow down for a few hours on a low nutrition bamboo diet. As the signs at the base point out, this kind of life makes the animal oddly endearing. Regrettably it also does not leave a lot of time for mating and the total worldwide estimated population of the species about 1,000. Breeding is the focus of the base and I felt myself strangely moved by the comparison between my own challenges dating and those of the Giant Panda.
