DC Day 5: Pandas at the National Zoo + Crawfish

I'm slowly finishing up my recap of our trip to DC. Today is Part 1 of our last full day.

On our last fully day in DC, we started off our morning taking the Metro up to the National Zoo.

 Since it was raining, all the animals were indoors. While this was somewhat disappointing, especially because a lot of the glass to the enclosures was dirty, it kept the crowds way down!

The big highlight and reason for our visit were the Giant Pandas. The pandas are on loan from China, and only one of three sets in the U.S. The male is named Tian Tian, and the female is Mei Xiang. My sister has always loved pandas, so this is something she really wanted to see. I didn't expect to think it was that cool, but I was fascinated by them.

They just sat there and ate bamboo the whole time we were in the Panda house. It was so interesting to watch their method of eating it! They would strip the leaves, crack it in half, and then strip the bamboo shoot with their teeth to get at the soft part inside which they then chewed on. I took a lot of photos of them...

And my mom took a photo of me taking photos -

Mom and Christine did some shopping at the Panda Gift Shop while Dad, Adam and I enjoyed sitting. Next we went and checked out the Elephant Building. The elephants had a huge new indoor space that was beautiful.

Our last stop was the Great Apes. The gorillas and chimpanzees were cool to watch.

You could spend a whole day at the zoo, but we had more to do that afternoon. It was getting to be lunch time, so we left the zoo and headed back to the Metro stop.  Across the street from the Metro is Hot N' Juicy Crawfish. If you recall, we really enjoyed eating there in Vegas, so added it to our list for DC. It's kind of a chain, kind of not - there are 2 in Vegas (on the same street), 2 in California, 1 in Orlando and 1 in DC. So it must be a tourist destination type chain. Regardless, it's awesome.

While we paid on our own way for the DC trip, we thought it would be fun to treat my fam to lunch here. Thanks for ordering all that beer dad! Haha. My seafood-hating-sister was a good sport and agreed to dine there. She had mozzarella sticks. Adam and I each had a pound of crawfish and split a pound of shrimp. My parents each got a pound of shrimp and split fries. It was a lot of food! I ended up eating half of my mom's shrimp. I think she was a little freaked out by the shrimp still in their shells!

A bib is necessary; it gets really messy!

After lunch, we took the Woodley Park Metro back to the National Mall area to hit up some museums. On the way, we took the longest escalator ever. It kind of freaked me out!