Exiting my 10-mile radius.... PART 1: AQUARIUM
Trip Start
Jul 27, 2006
1
19
93
Trip End
Ongoing
Osaka,
Japan
Monday, October 9, 2006
After meeting bright and early in Sannomiya (10:30 seemed pretty early after our late night of Karaoke) we rode the express train into Osaka- merely a 30 minute ride from the heart of Kobe. We hit up the Aquarium first which was packed considering the beautiful weather. We almost turned back after seeing a huge crowd waiting outside the aquarium, but after venturing a little further we noticed there was a show of some sort going on. After inching our way up to the front and realizing they had ducks on display, we decided we had all seen enough of that before and bypassed the crowd to get into the aquarium
Aquarium Entrance
. This place was huge! We started the journey by riding an escalator up endless flights of stairs and then wound down floor after floor viewing different levels of the aquariums. It was really quite amazing. I'm not gonna lie, I could have gone without the crying babies, annoying strollers, rude pushy children, oblivious parents, and the lovey -dovey couples starring star-gazed at each other instead of into the aquariums but... it was still part of the experience. Some of the neatest things I saw were the HUGE whale shark that looked like it popped out of 'Life Aquatic', the hypnotizing tank where the little tiny fishes kept a steady pace of swimming around the outside of the tank (i looked really hard to see if any fishes were daring enough to swim the opposite direction, but I found none- and then remembered that I was in Japan...), and the amazing jellyfish display where different tanks had different light schemes to illuminate the transparent jellyfish.
To be honest I really wasn't planning on going to the aquarium. It cost a lot of money, and I have seen a number of indoor aquariums before- so unless they have dolphins and killer whales doing tricks it's not really anything new. But my friends convinced me to go and I'm really glad I did. I found myself getting caught up in some of the tanks more than the children. I could have sat next to the time warp tank and watched those fishies swim around for hours- it was soooo peaceful.
