I went to the aquarium with my boyfriend on January 5th, before winter break ended. I hadn’t gone to one in like 8-10 years, and he had never gone to one before! So it was pretty exciting! We went quite a while ago, but ever since I started this 365 project I’ve had less energy to catch up with longer, more detailed blog entries.

We went to “late night” at the aquarium, which means after a certain time in the evening until closing, admission is half the original price. It’s a lovely deal if you like going later and think that 4 hours is enough. For most people 4 hours is definitely enough. We thought we would be done an hour before closing since there are only so many animals you can look at, but we were wrong! We ended up staying right up until closing. And we enjoyed every bit of it.

The fish we saw were fun to look at because of the endless varieties of shapes and colors and sizes. There were some creatures that looks very funny or strange. Just to name a few animals, we saw some sharks, jellyfish, starfish, sea birds, seals, otters, and others. They have a lorikeet forest (I LOVE birds, remember?) where you can feed them nectar, but since we went to “late night” the birds were already closed off and put to sleep.

I discovered this weird little stand at one station and was curious to see what it was. At first it looked like one of those coin shapers, where you put in a penny and it molds it into a souvenir coin. It turned out to be an embossing stamp station. The brochure/map that we got had a little section in the corners of the pages where you find & place the corresponding embossing stamp!

It was totally nerdy of me, but I got so exciting to have a little “mission” to go on and I was really stoked to find all of the stations and collect all the stamps. My boyfriend shared my ridiculous enthusiasm so it was really fun! haha. As we looked around excitedly for stamping stations, we noticed not a single person the entire night partaking in this stamp adventure, lol. It’s okay, we felt even more special and dorky because of it.

The sharks were my boyfriend’s favorite probably. There was this one gigantic, really scary looking shark that I wanted to take a picture of – but he kept swimming past me too fast! haha. I would try to get my camera ready, but as soon as he swam by, my camera could only get his tail. I must have spent at least 15-20 minutes watching him swim around the tank in a circle trying to get a shot of hin, haha. I gave up finally when he was coming around again, but decided to turn around in the opposite direction as soon as he got to me!

As for me, my favorite animals were this fish called the “weedy seadragon” and the “leafy seadragon.” They were SO cool! I love seahorses – I think they’re adorable – but these fish who are related to the seahorse have these weedy or leafy appendages that camouflage them! I think they look adorable but also really cool (tiny little dragons!) who are masters of disguise. Similar to the seahorse, these seadragons also have the strange behavior where the males have the burden of carrying the eggs (ya hear that, men? ).

At the aquarium, since it was past evening, there were less kids. During the day there are a lot of kids and families, and children going here for their school field trips. So it was nice having it be a little more quiet and adultish, rather than being run down by kids haha. There were couples who were our age, couples who were eldery, and middle-aged couples, too. It was fun seeing that. It kind of shows how the aquarium can be a really relaxing and fun place for people of all ages – and be a romantic date too, if you want it to be.

During the ride home, we were starving because it was past 9pm and we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. There were plenty of food places near the aquarium but we chose to go home to one of our local restaurants where we could use our rewards card to get a free appetizer, lol! It was fun having dinner because it extended our night even more. Good times.