There is a zoo in Saigon, and no it doesn't have pandas. It does have monkey. It seems strange to me that someone would keep an animal at the zoo and also eat it at the dinner table, but then again I bet monkey is delicious. The Saigon Zoo doesn't start off too impressively. It's in the middle of a park and it's not as organized as I am used to in the states. The first thing you see is a couple of ostriches and giraffes tucked away in a pen. From there you can't really see any of the other pens or animals and your not even sure they have anything else at first. It's a bit of a walk to find the other pens, and unlike I expected, they seem to have no one monitoring any of the pens. Once you start walking though you can see a plethora of wild jungle cats from all around Southeast Asia. This includes the wild jungle cat, which looks exactly like a normal house cat, except with leopard spots and claws to tear your face off. The zoo has a raised walkway above some African grazing animals, wildebeests, gazelles, and others. The zoo is populated with many, many bird cages filled with lots of large exotic looking birds. They have African elephants, a couple of hippos and even a white rhino. Which makes me wonder how the zoo here was able to attain a white rhino. The stars of the show have to be the lions and tigers. They are kept in a different area from the other wild cats and even have bigger cages. What was interesting to see was the drunk trying to get the male lion to strike at his hand. Unlike zoos in America where the big cats would be in a pit and you might be ten to twenty feet back from them, at the zoo in Saigon you're within arm's reach of the cage and there is no one around to tell you that lions are large dangerous animals. So after throwing a rock to wake the lion up, the drunk proceeded to bang on the metal bars of the cage in an attempt to get the lion to strike at him. In my mind I am still picturing the lion eating his hand. The zoo was fun.
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