An Interesting Day

Mom and I were only in the car for a total of about 20-30 minutes on Wednesday. All we had to do was pick up my visa, and, after driving around the aquarium, Mom just decided to park back at the motel and have us walk. (The visa, by the way, is not a minute sticker, but a full passport-page-sized one. Also, the photo from Wolf Camera was reduced to a very low quality.)

The Georgia Aquarium is quite nice. They have everything from whale sharks to beluga whales to a fish thought to have been extinct for a long time. We got to touch small sharks (they weren’t very rough) and shrimp, but there were two much more notable happenings at the aquarium.

The first involved the belugas. There was an aquarium man standing by the tank giving info to the crowds about the whales, and he mentioned that this was mating season. Apparently, beluga mating behavior involves the male raking the female he fancies with his teeth. Well, sure enough, that happened, and then he…shall we say, exposed himself. The female apparently wasn’t in the mood, so he made a fool of himself for nothing.

The second interesting event was the whale shark feeding. Not only did we get to watch four 15’+ beasts open wide to consume in great quantities, we ended up sitting next to a biologist who was recording their feeding behavior. We got to learn a lot from this – for example, the whale shark tank is designed to hold six average-sized (36’) whale sharks; they mustn’t feed by swimming up to the surface, as the tank is too shallow for that; their esophagi are the size of quarters; and so on. I also learned something interesting from the man MC-ing the feeding: he claimed that only four other aquaria had whale sharks, and three of those are in Japan. Poor me.

There was another cool part of the exhibit in which they discussed how they got the sharks to the States. They used UPS. I kid you not.

When it came time for dinner, Mom and I perambulated awhile in the vicinity of our motel, seeing if we could find any places to eat other than the ones we had already seen. It turned out that we were staying near a police station. What was even stranger was the sight I saw not too far from the police station – a man in a white suit with what I remember (or want to remember) as a white umbrella walking towards and talking with another man with white clothes. I can’t prove he was a pimp, but… Also during that stroll, we learned (from enquiring about walking through an inter-building bridge) that a tornado had touched down in Atlanta earlier this year, causing some $250 M in damage.

The last thing Mom and I did that night was take a trip up to the 72^nd story of the Westin hotel (which had been hit by the aforementioned tornado). It was dusk, and I got a brilliant view of the city from the observation area above the rotating restaurant. (Yes, you just read that.) We didn’t eat there, but we did go up to the rotating cocktail lounge and have some drinks. Mine, as usual, were non-alcoholic. That’s about all we’ll ever get to do in that hotel, though – Mom looked, and the price to stay there Is expensive.

The final thing Mom and I did in Atlanta was visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial. We got souvenirs for my dad, and I got a textbook on the civil rights movement. We looked around some as well, and got to see his tomb.

I’ll be leaving for the beach tomorrow (Saturday) and will only have spotty internet access. After our week-long stay on Hatteras Island, there will only be two weeks before I go to Japan. No more blogs until just before leaving.