Hikaru goes to the Aquarium

Hikaru likes science museums and aquariums, so he had to go check out Baltimore's Aquarium. He was a bit miffed we didn't make it to the science museum too, but we just couldn't get to everything!

But first we had to head over to dinner. We meant to go to a restaurant in Fells' Point, but strangely it was closed! There was apparently a power failure and they'd lost all their food!! But it all worked out because we found this awesome sushi restaurant right in our hotel's building (I could so have lived in that hotel forever...)

Suu stopped to admire some flowers before getting dinner...


It may seem a bit cruel to eat sushi before going to the Aquarium, but it's ok, we had veggie sushi and veggie tempura! They had some of the most interesting veggie sushi I'd ever had...



And you got an absolute *mountain* of tempura!!


After dinner, it was off to the Aquarium. If you show up before 8, they let you stay until 9:30 or 10 (after the aquarium closes). I guess this isn't really the "thing to do" on a friday night though, so we had the whole place to ourselves, practically! The first room we stopped in at the Aquarium was full of skates and sharks. It was pretty neat, but a little too dark for photos. Also a little too scary for good photos - you walked over bridges over open tanks of water!

However, one part of that room was safe for Pinkys: the seahorse tank!

Alice liked the seahorses...


Here's a better view of them:


Next up was the dolphins. But those, again, were too difficult for Pinky photos, so we skip them! We do have one picture of Hikaru checking out the machinery that was "behind the scenes" of all the tanks.

Pretty neat, eh?

Then it was on to the special exhibit: frogs! Hikaru was esp. excited about this, since he likes frogs almost as much as dinosaurs...





This is Hikaru with the Poison Dart frogs. They were really cute!


And very colorful...



These ugly customers were pretty fascinating too...


After we finished looking at the frogs we went over to the main exhibit. I think it was an exhibit on Australia, but it's amazing how fast the details blur.... *wah!*

At any rate, it had a lot of cool landscaping, with parts going way up into a third story with birds flying around the tree canopies. And parts going down to the first floor (a waterfall). So it was pretty neat. Here's Hikaru on the way in:


Inside the exhibit (2nd floor) were tanks of water with the fishies, etc. in them. Here's Hikaru admiring something in one of the tanks. What's that he's looking at?


Look out Hikaru!


And that concludes Day 2. *Whew!*