A busy Weekend Pt 2: Fish and Ferris Wheels

Sorry about the long wait between part 1 and part two. It has been a rather lazy week for me. I'll do better next time!

Nagoyako is a bit of a day trip mecca for Nagoya. Its got the Aquarium, a (very) small amusement park, an Italian village, and an Antarctic expedition ship/ museum. Lots of fun stuff in a small area. Since it was already 3 by the time we arrived, we really only had time for the Aquarium. Walking in the first thing you see is a couple big windows looking into the dolphin tanks. They have several different kinds of dolphin, and each tank opens out to the large stadium tank where they have acrobatic ocean mammal shows. The right-most tank was the only opened up but we didn't think much of it, just enjoyed looking at the pretty dolphins. Until the resident Orca shot in and just nailed one of the dolphins who didn't (or couldn't) get out of the way fast enough. It was a jaw dropping sight. I have long been fascinated by Killer Whales, but have never seen one up close, or if I have it was a loooooooong time ago. It was a stunningly beautiful creature, and moved in an almost effortless fashion. It was sleek and very speedy for its size.



The rest of the aquarium was in another building, and was organized along the route that the Antarctic expedition took from Japan to Australia to Antarctica. They had Tuna, Octopus and Rays in the Japanese local creatures area. There were of course tons of great tanks. They had an open tide pool, a huge tropical tank, and a tank filled with a few dozen baby sea turtles. So cute! The last display was penguins, which are such amazingly cool birds. All in all the aquarium certainly was worth the 2000 yen to get in. We next nipped over to the local food court for some tacos. Sadly they proved disapointing, but at least I got some rootbeer!




Across the street was the amusement park, with a huge ferris wheel. It was all lit up and quite beautiful in the dusk sky. We went for it, and got to see the last blush of sunset from the top. On the way down there was a fireworks display right nearby. It's too bad I wasn't at the top for that! From there it was back to Sakae for a few beers and an early night.