Exploring Nanjing: The Wetlands Park

I was going to take a nap this afternoon, but when I finally sat down to nap and saw that it was 5:00...well, I decided instead to put on New Girl and write a blog post.  Why not?  And it's a funny one, Schmidt's OCD is, well, OCD.  Ha.

Several weeks ago, when it was warm and sunny and fall was still here, we took an afternoon to explore a park near our home.  Living in a city of 7 million people, we are always looking for ways to see and experience nature and escape the people.  It's hard.  Nanjing has some great parks with lots of trees and grass, however, usually they are filled with people.  Fortunately for us this park wasn't! 

The Wetlands park is a little south and a little east of the city proper.  We heard about it through a friend and were excited to check it out.  With our friend who was visiting in tow, we set out to find the park at the end of the rainbow.  And we found it.  And it was awesome.   Here is our photo proof. 

See, isn't this park cool?  Ok, so it's not really wetlands.  At one point it probably was, it kinda looks like it should be, minus the boardwalk. We also climbed this cool "bird watching tower" (that I regrettably don't have a picture of).  The Hubby said it looked liked something out of Zelda.  The park also had an interpretative center for kids.  It looked neat but we didn't go in it.  We did, however, take advantage of the props outside (see picture below).

The bird on the right is the mascot for the park, the lamb (at least that's what I think it is) on the left is a famous cartoon character over here, and the cute guy sticking his face through it?  Well, he's taken. 

It was a fun day and I'm glad we got to explore somewhere new.  Now that it is starting to get colder, I'm not sure we'll visit this park again soon.  But hopefully next Spring we can have a picnic or two here with our friends.  And maybe next time we'll visit the interpretative center.