Here’s a strange fact for you to start your week with: there’s a good chance that some of the world’s pandas have had better, more comfortable international flights than you have.
See, any panda in any zoo around the world is on loan from China, and all internationally born pandas must return to China within their first three years.
This in itself is worth a quick pause; I can see them wanting their own pandas back, but insisting that pandas born elsewhere remain property of China? Kind of makes China seem like that kid you knew growing up, who used permanent marker to write his name on all his toys, and charged you to borrow them.
Anyway, when they do fly back to China, they fly comfortably.
When Bao Bao went back to China from Washington DC in 2017, for example, he traveled in a custom-built enclosure that measured 78 inches by 54 inches by 52 inches, which is roughly the size of the dorm room I slept in at university. He also traveled with almost half his body weight in food– apples, cooked sweet potato, biscuits, and of course plenty of bamboo.
And I’ll have to fact-check this, but I’m pretty sure Bao Bao didn’t have to worry about getting stuck in front of a bratty toddler panda who spent the whole flight kicking his enclosure.
All this really goes to show just how important pandas are to China. Culturally, symbolically, and politically, they are an indispensable part of the country’s identity.
You, however, will have to be content with regular, human-class travel.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Gold Panda (from the UK; not on loan from China) is an expert in something critics have called ‘micro-sampling’ – taking split-second snippets and threading them together. Here, he does it with a variety of unidentifiable yet identifiably Eastern instruments.
2. The kick drum stutters, rather than hitting every beat of the bar.
3. The song only makes its way to the home base of its key signature every 18 bars. Or, in panda time, three years.
Recommended listening activity:
Looking at a plane flying overhead and wondering who’s on board.