world at the aquarium

Today was a holiday in Japan and Hiroshi and I went to Kasai Rinkaikoen which is a huge park near Disney Land. The park has a giant ferris wheel and an aquarium. The aquarium is actually surprisingly cheap - it is only 700 yen to enter.

Of course, being a holiday weekend, and a park, and I assume a cheap form of entertainment (only a couple hundred yen for kids), I swear, the entire population had the same idea as we did. It was absolutely nuts.

The aquarium itself is quite good. They have a fair-sized tank with sharks swimming around and a very large tank with tuna. The tuna are the main attraction. There are also feeding times, but we didn't stick around for those, so I don't know how exciting that would be. The mandatory penguins (Japanese people love penquins) were also present, but in an outside area and I felt rather sorry for them. I mean, I'm sure penguins are not used to 35C humid weather.

At all of the tanks, there were crowds of people at least 4 deep. It was nuts. Half of them were screaming or pushy children with no manners too. I now know where all the misbehaved children are in Japan - Kasai Rinkai! (You never see bad children here. I think I have seen 2 in 6 and a half years.) I don't deal well in crowds, so this was not such a good thing. I even tried to take a de-stress time-out, but there was no where to sit down! All the seats were taken. We did make it into a big auditorium-like area though and found the last couple of seats and just watched the tuna swim around for a bit.

The tank has several kinds of tuna in it. My favourite were the yellow fins. There fins really do have bright yellow tips. Very pretty. It was also interesting to see how many of the fins (on the tuna as well as some of the other fish) were not fully attached to the body, and they moved, flopping to one side of the body, as the fish navigated through the water. Kind of hard to explain, but for some reason I also thought a triangular fin, top pointing upward, would be completely joined to the fish's body along the base. This is not so. Very pretty to watch the fins move.

Eventually we just skipped a lot of exhibits and got the heck out of there. When you get out of the aquarium itself, you walk along nice pathways and can look at the fresh water environment. We just high-tailed it to the exit. And there, just before we exited back into the park was a vending machine delivered from God... Hagen Daaz. (sp?) Let me tell you, that ice cream was so darn good! We sat in the shade under some trees and ate it.

Then we jumped back on the train and went out to CostCo. Got lots of stuff as always, but things that weren't too heavy! This is good, because we didn't kill ourselves carrying it back home.