Mack is a year old today. To celebrate, we took him to the Beijing Zoo first thing in the morning to see the Earthquake Pandas, also known as the Olympic Pandas. The pandas were supposed to come up to Beijing for the Olympic tourism season, but they were sent up early after the earthquake hit their panda reserve in Sichuan.
Around 8 a.m., half an hour after the zoo opened, keepers wearing rubber boots began strewing armloads of bamboo around the glassed-in enclosure of the Olympic Panda House. Then the pandas were released from a door in the rear. People cheered. The pandas are two years old, a bit taller (on all fours) than knee-high to an adult human. Appearing all at once, they gave the impression of actually, adorably tumbling into view. Christina reports that there were eight of them, and I am taking her word on it, because I was trapped against a pillar-like window frame by the surge of panda admirers and couldn't really step back and count.
Before long, the panda-entranced crowd had become something in which you would not want to have a one-year-old, and especially something in which you would not want to be a one-year-old. We retreated to the outside. Next door and a little downhill was the Asia Games Panda House, built in honor of the 1990 Asia Games in Beijing. Outside it, in a pit with a sliding board and teeter-totter overgrown with weeds, a full-grown panda was sitting in near anonymity. People gave it a glance as they hurried toward the Olympic Pandas. "The Olympic Pandas can't be that lazy and dirty," someone said.
The Asia Games Pandas--there were more around back--looked fine to us.
For the birthday dinner, we had chicken noodle soup, which came out as mostly noodles. Mack ate his share in large fistfuls, getting about half of each fistful into his mouth. The other half ended up on his shorts. To go with the noodles, he had some blueberries (halved to reduce the choking hazard).
After dinner, he had cake.
The cake was a banana cake from a recipe we found online, in a set of first-birthday-cake recipes. We had begun to pour the batter into the pan last night when we tasted a beater and realized that, in the interest of providing wholesome fare for delicate young eaters, the author of the recipe had relied on a single banana as the sole sweetener for the whole cake. So we poured the batter back into the bowl, mixed in a reasonable-seeming quantity of brown sugar, and tried again. It tasted like cake batter, or maybe like some batter intermediate between cake and banana bread. When it was finished and frosted, Mack seemed to like it.
