Sunday 17 April 2011

Day Seventeen: Sea Life Centre

I was really excited about today. I love large aquariums and so does the toddler, and we'd never been to this one before. And as we were waiting outside for the people in front of us to have their pictures taken beside a plastic seahorse we noticed that the annual pass is precisely the cost of two visits. This means, of course, that I now have three separate annual passes to all our favourite exhibits and will be making lots more visits to the same places over the next year.

Anyway, once we'd filled in the forms and collected our cards we got to the entrance, which told us to wait and be patient. We waited (impatiently; you can't tell me how to feel) and once the door swung open in we went, only to be greeted by possibly the most unlikely article ever to grace an aquarium.


I don't mean to disparage our host city, but only a place as land-locked as this one would think that a plastic cow would be the appropriate sideboard decoration in a fisherman's cottage. What you can't see is that it's about a foot tall.


The first exhibit is a reconstructed snapshot of our local river.


Perhaps they took their accuracy bried a couple of steps too far. There's valuable Pfand in those bottles.


So many awesome fis...... wait, what's that over there?


Schooling fish!!


A surprising number of the exhibits are open, which has both good and bad points.


This is the good: at the bottom of this tub is a living starfish, gently stroked by a well-trained toddler.

The downside? She didn't understand why she couldn't touch everything from this point on.


A sea turtle. This bit here salvaged the day for us me. There's a short glass tunnel at this Sea Life Centre where you can walk through and admire all the good stuff: sharks, rays, giant turtles and the like. The problem when we got there was that there must have been 50 people in it all standing still and taking pictures. So we waited patiently for ten minutes to get in, eventually stepped in and then an employee announced we had to leave (while studiously ignoring the people standing in front of us taking photos). I realise that she was probably harassed and annoyed herself, but it put a damper on the day for me that because other people had been inconsiderate and we'd waited patiently we'd lost out on any time in the tunnel. And then when I pointed this out to her she was snotty and rude to me. However, tunnel schmunnel: when you get out of the lift after the tunnel you can see the top bit of the tank the tunnel is the bottom of and we saw the turtle and a middle-sized shark.


And this rather inexplicable wooden horse.

So there you have it: lots of fish, some bizarre decoration and no flash photography (hence the fuzzies; don't judge). Tomorrow is bringing a very special surprise, but you won't find out what the surprise is until Tuesday, because it won't happen until after the toddler is (hopefully) fast asleep.

1 comment:

  1. I love reading your posts and watching how intently M looks at everything! She seems truly happy to experience each new thing she comes across.

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