Out of the cab, Sarah holds our place at
the gates while I walk around with the kids. When we come back twenty minutes
later, there’s about 200 other people waiting. The gates open, we’re the second
family to get tickets, and we’re off to the races. We start at the outdoor
ponds where we see sea otters and huge sea turtles. There’s actually a pretty
big turtle area, including a rehab facility for injured ones. We see one poor
guy with a cracked shell who’d collided with a boat (but there are multiple displays
showing rehabbed turtles being returned to the wild).
Next, we go underground and get to the absolute
best part of the day. There’s a huge conical room surrounded by an aquarium and
there’s a glass tunnel leading between this room and the next where you can
stand and watch sharks, manta rays, sawfish, and other things swim inches above
your head. It’s amazing. The sharks are very cool, but the rays are the best.
Some plaster themselves to the glass, open and closing their weirdly human-like
mouths. And fish just run into each other constantly. A shark and a ray will
just slap into each other, shrug it off, and keep on swimming. We stayed until
hoards of students descended, and then we moved on. Next was a room with belugas
– huge, muscular, and noisy. You could hear them clicking away to one another.
There were also big, mustachioed sea lions, swimming laps and being obesely
cute. We spent a little bit of time at a penguin exhibit, and a really tiny
amount of time with crocodiles, and then we went to see the dolphin show. The
show was mostly in Spanish, and began with like three different videos about
water conservation and recycling, and I commend everyone’s patience enduring
them. Finally, dolphins! They jumped, and flipped, and waved their flippers,
and played catch, and did all the things that make dolphins awesome. Big hit
with the kids, and now Veronica wants to be a dolphin trainer.
We get separate cabs on the way back and
this time we haven’t thought ahead. My exchange with the driver goes like this:
Dave: Can we go to the cruise port?
Driver: The airport?
Dave: No, sorry. The port. With the boats.
Driver: *looks confused*
Dave: *begins using his hands to create the
likeness of a cruise ship, thinks better of it* Um, we’re going to the boats.
The ships. The big ships. At the dock.
Driver: Ah, the big ships! Yes! Sorry, my
English is… video games.
I love that so much. If I live to be one hundred years old, I will never, ever forget, “My English is… video games.”
On port days, you can arrange to sign the
kids in earlier to kids’ club, and we do this. The initial plan is to sign them
in and run back out and explore the city. But after sitting in the stateroom
for a few minutes, we realize that going back out will just create this
watch-the-clock time pressure, and alternately we could sack out for an uninterrupted
three hours straight. We go with plan B, and it’s fantastic. Later, we spring
the kids and I take Veronica climbing. I don’t know how many times we do the
wall but I know that by the end the strength in my forearms and fingers is
completely gone.
We finish the night at Izumi again. Sarah’s
dad gets hot rock beef tenderloin, which he seems to quite like. The rest of us
get about thirty pounds of sushi. It’s as delicious as last time, but where I
was proud of not eating myself to the point of illness on our first visit, I’m
fit to burst this time. I couldn’t even eat a mint. Not even a wafer-thin one.
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