Monday, June 30, 2008

water water (and smelly children) everywhere

For my birthday this year (41. who'da thunk it!) my sister paid for me to go to a meditation workshop at our local yoga centre. Unfortunately the workshop was cancelled as the teacher couldn't get there – she was too stressed. just kidding. she was flying in from LA and there was a problem with her flight.
So we got a refund and had to think of something else for my special day.
I decided on the London Aquarium as i) I've never been ii) i love love love snorkelling so figured it would be like that but while being fully clothed. and no jet lag!
We went on Saturday afternoon. It was baking. The Aquarium, therefore, would be empty right? Who (apart from me) would want to go to the indoor, dark Aquarium on one of the hottest weekends of the year?
Erm.... about 400 other people. And their children.
Now, for some reason I'd created this image of the Aquarium in my mind, which was all lovely crystal blue waters, endless exotic fish and a brilliant glass walkway/tunnel where you ACTUALLY WALK THROUGH A TANK OF MASSIVE FISH!
What we got instead was a dark and dingy basement with home aquarium stylee tanks with grubby windows, in front of which an army of space-invading, shouty children gathered banging on the glass while their parents took endless photos with endless flashes from their cameras, even though the signs everywhere clearly stated NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY.
I was terrorised by one particularly loathesome specimin of smelly boyhood who, I swear to God, appeared at every window I stopped, leaning into me and pressing his face against the glass.
At one tank, as I admired the parrot fish, he actually bobbed up in front of me like a shark! Or a turd in the sea. Not nice.
Unperturbed, sister and I skipped a couple of tanks to get away from the throng of families and found ourselves watching an episode of Life On Earth as what we thought were two crabs 'making lurve' turned out to be one crab eating a smaller one. We only found this out when an even bigger crab came along and nicked lunch from the smaller rival.
Next we made our way to the ray tank for some light petting – i'd been looking forward to tickling a ray's tummy all week. apparently they like it. they do!
So, we get to the tank and guess what! No petting! No bombing or necking either. obviously in these post Steve Irwin times man must not pet a ray. Which would be fine, except there was one little blighter plopping up and down on the surface of the pool, looking really upset that all the potential ticklers standing around goggling him/her weren't even putting their hands in the water – prefering instead to blind him/her with endless flash photography. or bang on the walls of his home.
Oh well, at least we had the brilliant glass walkway/tunnel where you ACTUALLY WALK THROUGH A TANK OF MASSIVE FISH to look forward to.
Only of course, we didn't. Moving past a couple more dingy windows we found ourselves unceremoniously guided toward the exit and through the obligatory gifte shoppe.
At the exit we were asked to fill in a questionairre about our experience.
Do you have children? it asked. No, I replied. And after today I don't want anyway.
I'm going to Barcelona in a few weeks where there is an aquarium with a brilliant glass walkway/tunnel where you ACTUALLY WALK THROUGH A TANK OF MASSIVE FISH! can't wait! it's bound to be really quiet at this time of year.

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