The Final

Following is a description of todays final:

1. Answering two questions from the jury.
2. Fast quiz a la jeopardy.
3. Being able to recognize eight types of bamboo.
4. Performing our "special gift" to the pandas and the city of Chengdu. My presentation was to sing a song I had written to the music of Ronan Keatings "Iris".
5. Introducing one of the six famous Giant Pandas. This was the final step in the competition and I was really nervous before my presentation. My panda was Xing Bang and when I finally walked up to the stage to give my presentation all my anxiety disappeared and I got the last points that took me to the top six position and becoming a Pambassador!

Pambassadors from left to right, David (France), Yumiko (Japan), Ashley (US), Cissi (Guangzhou China), ME!, Jelly Fish (Taiwan).

Big love and Giant Panda hugs to everyone!
Pambassador Ali

A hug to remember

We are asked to wake up earlier than before. It’s the day before the competition and we are greeted by tons of media as we arrive to the panda base. They question of the day is as always “how do you feel” and “do you think you have a good chance to become a pambassador”. The tone of the questions are very competitive oriented and gives us an aura of being in a reality show. This feeling passes away quickly when we enter the nursery station. One of the areas in the nursery station is accessible for tourists and behind two glassed walls we can see a baby panda and a couple of cubs dreaming away.

Small facts:

1. The panda baby ways 1/1000 of her mother’s weight. Around 50-190 grams.

2. Keepers will sometimes hand rear the baby panda, this is usually done when the mother has given birth to twins and is not able to feed both of babies herself. In the wild the mother will only nurse the strongest baby and will reject the other.  Another technique that is commonly used in captivity is “baby swapping”, where the keepers will swap the twins from the mothers chest by distracting the panda mother with food or by placing a big bowl of milk in front of her face. This allows both babies to receive the essential nutritions and social interactions needed for their future lives.

3. The keepers will also rub/massage the panda cub’s lower stomach to help them defecate. This is to imitate the mothers natural behavior in the wild. The panda cubs stomach is not ready to digest  the mothers milk properly from birth.

In the beginning of our adventure we were told to memorize as much panda facts as we could in order to work as tour guides in Chengdu panda base. And today was time to show off our skills.

Me and Cissi talking about Giant Pandas and the environment with some lovely elementary school children.

Before we were allowed to go home the panda base had yet another surprise for us. Although it was mainly a media thing I was extremely excited when they told us we would take pictures while hugging sub adult pandas!



Getting a high five from one of the cubs!

Tomorrow is the day of the final and I have too many things to prepare. I'm prepared to do my best and really hope I can become one of the six Pambassadors. Even if I wouldn't make it to the top six I've had a wonderful time here in Chengdu and I will never forget this once in a lifetime experience.

Thanks for the support everybody!

Ali

Today was all about enriching the life of the Giant pandas living in captivity. By enrichment we mean adding elements in the enclosed habitat of the giant panda with the goal to simply make the life in the enclosure more interesting and fun. There are many types of enrichment methods:

1. Hiding food.
2. Bulding/planting trees and other climbing facilities. In the wild the giant panda loves to climb trees and despite its clumsy appearance she is an excellent climber.
3. Climbing and eating stance. And this is what we built today

Today we had a competition among the teams to build the best panda "home"/stance. We were divided in our usual teams and team C was ready as always.

Yumiko from Tokyo Japan, me, Cissi from Guangzhou China, Chriszelda from South Africa and Rachel from USA. Our home even has a swing.

Earlier in the day we cleaned out yet another panda residence and fed a couple of adorable Giant Pandas.



These days we are all feeling the pressures of the upcoming final on wednesday (29 September). I still have to prepare my special "gift" and prepare for my panda presentation. Haven't got more than 3-4 hours of sleep during the last days and we can all feel the pressure is rising.

Thanks for reading my blog. Hope to see you soon.

Ali Shakorian

Free time with host family!

Today a nice girl from CCTV visited me for a full day interview. My host family took me to Chengdus second signature namecard, Yin Shan Relics. This wonderful historical site was surprisingly discovered by a building company in 2005. Thanks to the findings a 1000 years has been added to the history of Chengdu. This discovery was so important to all of China that the government immediately bought back the land and invested several billion yuans to bulid a museum on the site. And after my visit I can tell you that it is an amazing discovery! With the relics found in this area it would be enough to build 10 museums anywhere else.

A wonderfull symbol enlarged outside the museum. The symbol represents the sun in the middle and the sun birds flying around it. According to archeologists the people who lived here before believed that the sun moved around with the help of the wind from the sunbirds wings. Beautiful.

Some of thousands of Jade artifact found on the spot.

The famous mask. Maybe an alien visited?

Another fantastic jade ornament.

Later me and my host family went down town to promote the panda base and collect autographs for me and the pandas.

A lot of running around but I had great fun doing it.

As if the day wasn’t fun enough we ended it with some flying !!!

Thank you for reading my blog, hope to see you soon
Ali Shakorian

Saturday and Panda valley!

Saturday and Panda valley!

Today we visited one of the most ambitious and important projects of the panda base. Bringing Pandas back into the wild. An area called Panda valley will be used to re-introduce the pandas into the wild. This valley is divided into three parts .

In the first part the pandas will have interaction with humans and keepers , but not as much as in the panda base. In the second part of the valley only professional keepers will have access to the pandas and in the third part there will be no interaction between pandas and humans whatsoever . The project is a long term commitment from the panda base and hopefully within 15 to 30 years we can see positive results  says one of the project leaders.

During the day me and Frank, my Chinese host father, had the honor to plant a bamboo tree.

Construction is still under way and the panda valley will open for the public 2013.

Later on Saturday we visited Dujiangyan, a UNESCO world heritage site famous for it’s 2000 year old dam construction.

Ancient dam construction.

I also fell in love with a street dog in Dujiangyan. He looks just like a panda and I was seconds from bringing him with me.

Thank you for reading my blog, hope to see you tomorrow.
Ali Shakorian

Day 3, Taking care of the panda!

Today was all about learning the necessary skills of how to take care of the Pandas in the Chengdu panda base. And let me tell you there is allot of that needs to be taken care of and can be hard work at times, but the dream team Chriszelda, Yumiko and me were to excited to feel any hardship at all.

 

 Me and Chris sprinkling and mopping

  

 The panda feces

 

 Chris giving my hair a brush, doesn't help though my hair lives its own life.

 

 Everything needs to be recorded , our panda expert to Harry(to the right) explains all the details.

 Today me and Chris cleaned Mei Lan's room, her feces where soft and weighed 8kg. by the color of the feces light green yellowish we could determine that she had eaten more of the bamboo shots. Yumiko cleaned Xiong Bangs room and collected a sum of 12 kg of feces!

 Panda food! Bamboo shoots.

 Meil lan giving us the puppy eyes as we feed Xiong Bang on the other side of the enclosure.

So we fed her some apples as well.

We continued our fantastic day with cleaning the whole outdoor enclosure for the 5 young panda clowns.

The boys are locked up in their indoor room while we are outside cleaning. But of course they know that a reward is coming their way.

First we got to wash them with a hose and the young pandas really enjoyed the fresh water. 

 After we got to feed them with apples and panda cakes, the same cakes I described in a earlier post.

 Chris working hard picking up feces

 I'm analyzing the smell as I pick up the feces in my smurf suite.

Really hard to get the feces out from between the bamboo wood.

 The guys are allowed to go back and seem to enjoy their clean habitat and the food Yumiko carried put out them.

 This panda is making sure we cleaned every spot of the enclosure

 

A final goodbye before we leave the pandas.

Later we made our way to the WWF office in Chengdu where we met the staff and learned about the ongoing projects and efforts from WWF in Chengdu. Some of the WWF's main focus points are:

1. Monitoring the natural reserves

2. Educating the surrounding community

3. Sustainable harvesting

 We aslo learn that next year is the 50th birthday of  WWF. Happy birthday! What really made the day even more amazing was a thank you letter  from Isabella Louis the Interim representativ of WWF China. In the letter we are all invited to become honorary volunteers for WWF China and continue our work to be advocates for panda conservation

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!

Pambassador (candidate) Ali

Day 2. Meet the Pandas!

Wow, today we spent the whole day learning about the Giant Pandas living in the Chengdu Panda base. The whole base is like a bomb of cuteness and its very hard not to feel touched when walking around.

 Entry of Chengdu Panda Base

All candidates had their posters shown in the base, this is mine.

Shortly after we arrived we had a welcoming conference were we got to meet the judges. Panda father and head of the project Dr. Zhang Zhi He officially welcomed everybody and held a heart warming speech. Present was also media from all over China.

After the welcome meeting the Chengdu panda base experts give us an extensive background information about the aims of the base, it's history, research programs and progress in conversation. They also teach us the names of the twelve Pandas that we from now on will focus on and describe the different characteristics of each Panda and how to recognize them.

Pambassadors clicking away. To the left we see the wonderful Ms.Susan,  one of the coordinators for Project Panda.

A panda perfectly making a peacock sandwich from the leafs on the bamboo.

This could be me in the morning.

Majestic panda climbing trees. It's very easy to forget that pandas are excellent climbers and hide enormous muscles under the fuzzy fur.

Young pandas loving the milk given by the keepers.

SiYuan chilling after a king size meal. Si Yuans charachteristic is that she has white spots on her hands.

Beautiful scenery from the base.

 Round and Rounder

Xiong Bang with his Mickey mouse ears.

"This is embarrassing"

"At least let me do a Kong fu pose"

"Either you feed me or you let me sleep"

These young pandas were just too much to handle. Watching them was like watching a slap stick comedy with perfect acting. These guys were just all over the place and even the experienced keeper couldn't hold back his smile.

Qiu Bang wondering away in thoughts while chewing on his panda cake. One day I will learn "pandanese" and philosophize with him over a nice tasty panda cake.

Thank you so much for reading and hope you will come back tomorrow

Pambassador Ali