Chinese Garden

I had a very nice visit to the Chinese Gardens by my apartment today.  They were very peaceful and beautiful.  Here are a couple pictures.

In the gardens, there was a Turtle and Tortoise museum.  Apparently, it is the world's largest collection of tortoises and turtles in the world, at 3,456 - what they don't tell you is that most of these are tortoise and turtle figurines, not real ones.  Only about 1000 of them are actually alive.  But, 1000 turtles and tortoises is still a lot!  After seeing the museum, I feel quite bad that I paid them my $5 and supported them, because the turtle conditions looked pretty horrible - small, filthy cages with lots of turtles crowded together.  However, it was pretty interesting to see the huge variety of species.  Most of the land tortoises were pretty cute.  Like this little guy:

A lot of the aquatic turtles were kind of gross and scary looking.  These snake-necked turtles were especially creepy:

And then...there were the pig-nosed turtles.  Here's a picture of one:

Doesn't look too scary, right?  WRONG.  Each pig-nosed turtle was in it's own tank, and there was a long wall full of these tanks.  As I walked down the wall, all the turtles started struggling against the walls of their cages and snapping their mouths.  Now, I'm sure this was a completely normal turtle response, because they assumed I was going to feed them, but it was scary!  The walls of their cages were not all that high, and these were pretty big turtles - at least a foot long.  For a few tense minutes, I was convinced that the turtles had coordinated an insurrection and that they were all going to break out and devour me alive.  Luckily, they calmed down, and I was only left with this guy to worry about:

I made it out of there unscathed, but I don't think I'll be going to any more turtle museums in the future!