If you have been reading this website for any length of time, then you know that I am a little obsessed with PandaCam, and the baby panda Su Lin in San Diego. Well, there is a baby panda on this coast as well, and his name is Butterstick.

Well, that's not his real name, it is the name that some DC-area bloggers have christened him. His real name is Tai Shan. This weekend, Mike and I went to visit him and his mother Mei Xiang in the National Zoo.

The National Zoo is free, but you have to get tickets for a time slot to enter the panda viewing area. I was taking no chances that I would miss the baby panda (since they can't guarantee that he will be out), so I ordered four different time slots, starting in the early morning, when they are supposed to be most active. We got there a little after the zoo opened at 8am. Then we quickly realized we wouldn't even need our tickets, because the Stick and his mom were already out and about, and you could see them from above as well, at the Panda Pavilion. The baby panda bumbled around while his mom ate bamboo, and then disappeared down a little slump. After watching for forty minutes (and taking hundreds of photos), we went around to the ticketed entrance and used our first ticket.

We were only there for a few minutes before the Stick emerged again, to the "ooohs" and "ahhhs" of the crowd. It was kind of funny, because they had put metal around most of the trees in their area to prevent the Stick from climbing them, which is typical panda cub behavior. There was only one tree that he could get up in, and it looked well-used. When he climbed up it, the crowd immediately began speculating how he would get down again. "He'll fall out," one woman said. "That's what he always does."

By the time we left to go to the gift shop, I had filled both my memory cards with pictures of the Stick. After the gift shop, we started back to the car, and Mike said, "Let's stop by the pavilion once more before we go." It turned out to be a great intuition, because when we returned, the Stick was wrestling with his mom. I immediately started erasing pictures from the day before to make room for even more panda pictures.

We left after that, having spent two and a half hours and several gigs of memory on panda photos. All told, a successful Panda Weekend! Except for the pandas, DC was kind of lame. We went to the Smithsonians (Natural History and Air and Space), and they seemed (to me, who'd never been before) boring and outdated, and (to Mike, who had been as a kid) much smaller than remembered. Is there anything cool about DC besides pandas?? The cherry blossoms weren't out yet.

I also went to Disney World last week and returned in one piece, so I will post about that soon, too.