Asian Lantern Festival, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo July 22nd 2023

This year I took Mingmei along with me. She posed with this creature guarding the entrance to the zoo, which traditionally is said to protect Chinese buildings. It's called a fu dog, among many other names. I also took a picture of the entrance by night.

Mingmei and I took turns in an oversized Adirondack chair.

Mingmei liked this lantern, because she looked like another doll.

She also wanted to pose with a blue flower, and a row of stars, suns and moons.

The large display in the lagoon this year was a dragon boat.

 

Of course, we saw some animals. Here is a snow leopard, a swan family, and elephants. My camera has a fantastic night setting.

We also saw some wolves this year! The wolf enclosure is attached to a log cabin, which holds a fish tank, some places to sit, and some information about the 1925 Nome Serum Run, featuring lead dogs Togo and Balto. Balto and his team have a Cleveland Zoo connection. The back of the log cabin faces the wolf enclosure, which has large clear windows. As we were there around dusk, the wolves were apparently coming out to move around. These are Mexican wolves, so they don't look as enormous as wolves from further north.

Once again there were several displays with light and movement. This group of butterflies and vines was part of an open tunnel.

Lastly, here's a picture of the vast difference between lantern displays by day, and by night. Of course, these umbrellas are also colored differently by night.

Mr. BTEG and I enjoyed it, although we will never go on a weekend again if we can help it!

Asian Lantern Festival at Cleveland Zoo, with Asian Babysitting Skipper

My daughter The Dancer usually works on Sundays, but since she had off, I suggested that we go to the Asian Lantern Festival currently on at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, as we both wanted to check it out. A mutual friend of Mr. BTEG and the Dancer also joined us.

There were so many incredibly beautiful scenes set up, and we had a great time. Fortunately for us the weather was bearable, because we walked around the zoo twice, once during daylight, and once after the sun had set. For anybody familiar with the Cleveland Zoo, we didn't walk around the whole zoo, as a good bit of it was shut down, including the Australian Adventure section. I would have loved sharing pictures with my Aussie readers. :) Of course, we didn't have much time for extensive picture taking. We were at the zoo over three hours as it was, although we did see a show between our two walks, and also took a breather a couple of times.

I didn't take a lot of pictures with my doll, now named Mingmei. There weren't a lot of places to get her into the picture in an interactive way, since the lanterns were usually well behind fences. Also, as I said, I was with two other people, so I didn't want to take forever setting up shots. The Dancer did hold Mingmei for me while I took pictures. Here are the shots that I took. There will be more shots from the event, without Mingmei, below the fold, if you are interested. And although this event was called the Asian Lantern Festival, everything there was focused on Chinese culture and history.

In front of a parasol, which was one of several. I got a good shot of some other ones from the set-up at night, below the fold. I want to make a blog header out of this, but Google is not letting me at the moment.

A goldfish and bubbles. According to a sign, goldfish are symbols of wealth and prosperity in China.

Narcissus flowers.

A blue ball. There was also a pink one, and they both looked like giant Christmas ornament balls.

By the beautiful archway that stood at the entrance/exit of the zoo.

Mini Mooshka Fairytale Dolls

Sunday evening Mr. BTEG and I had to take a run to Target, despite the bad weather. On the way there, we got the expected robocall from my daughter's school, saying that they were closed on Monday. Woo hoo! Since I was going to have a cozy snow day at home, I felt like it would be nice to have a couple of new dollies to play with.

I've been looking at the Mini Mooshka dolls for a while. I'm not into the bigger cloth dolls, but the minis look like homemade wooden toys. Between their appearance and the Russian-sounding names, they remind me of matryoshka dolls. They're made by MGA Entertainment, which also makes Lalaloopsy, among other dolls, and seems to own Little Tykes as well.

Meet Palia and Casia.