Pictures from an aquarium

[shewhomust]

Something more cheerful than my last post: continuing our travels in California last spring. It wouldn't have occurred to me to visit an aquarium, but the one in Monterey was enthusiastically recommended to us by a variety of people, none of whom are hardened aquarium visitors. So we booked ourselves an overnight in Monterey, at the Clarion Hotel, up a long hill from the waterfront but very comfortable, with swimming pool. They offered a two day ticket to the aquarium for the price of a single day, and armed with this we split our visit in two, with a preliminary sortie in the late afternoon, and a more thorough exploration the following morning - a very successful strategy. And did we see anything? Yes, wonderful things:

I wasn't expecting the puffins - strange, foreign puffins with eyebrows, but puffins nonetheless, acrobatic show-off puffins in their glass box, hurling themselves off the rocks into the water, skidding to a perfectly judged halt, beak not quite touching the glass. There's a constant temptation to anthropomorphise these birds: I don't really believe they were performing for their admiring audience, but did they even know we were there? I would rather not think that what I was watching was a skill born of long practice in running up to the boundaries of their confined space.

I took many pictures of blurred shapes, puffins in motion, turning their backs, diving, distorted by the surfact of the water. Also of murres and guillemots. I was disappointed that the shop had, among its many glossy books, nothing about the auks: I found in all one postcard (I don't count the keyring featuring an Atlantic puffin).

The aquarium is good on presentation. This is the transition from passageway to gallery, a circle of ceiling framed by glass walls behind which a shoal of silver darlings speed round and round. Elsewhere, a glass wall two stories high reveals a huge tank in which big fish - and the occasional wet-suited diver - appear and disappear.

They threw us out at closing time. We fortified ourselves with coffee and sealife-themed biscuits, and walked around Cannery Row and read the information panels and looked at the shops and the oceans. The next morning we swam before breakfast, because we could, and then we went back to the aquarium for more: there were jellyfish and more jellyfish and yet more jellyfish. There were sand dollars. There was a section of wetland birds, including a very charming plover. There were sea dragons.

At least, they tell me there were sea dragons, and there seem to be pictures of sea dragons. I'm still not sure I entirely believe in them.

All the photos of Monterey; just the aquarium photos.

Comments

Inner-Terrestrials All Over The Place

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Oh, one just has to love the octopus biscuit! Also, I´m sure those birdies were merely showing off, by the look of them, that´s what anyone wearing that style would do. And the last picture in the post: what´s that? A sea-horse vs. algaea relationship? Looks complicated.