Manatees and Hotdogs
Well Kaston and I had a rather different day on Sunday. Instead of sitting around and playing Kingdom Hearts 2 or World of Warcraft, we decided to go visit the [Dallas World Aquarium](http://www.dwazoo.com) that we’d spotted off Highway 75 on our last drive down to College Station.
The drive was stressful, as driving in Dallas is wont to be, but eventually we found the Aquarium and a place to park. We waited in a short line to get our tickets, and walked from the hot Texas day into a humid South American rain forest.
The first things we saw were interesting, but nothing unusual. Some interesting birds, a sign for a monkey we couldn’t find, some ducks. Then, out of a large pool of water a story below us, a manatee surfaced and dove back under. It was enormous! From there it got more fun - several different types of monkeys (including these awesome-looking [emperor tamarin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Tamarin)), were in some trees on a small island in the middle of the tank with the two manatees, and toucans cried loudly from the rafters above us.
We came up to that ever-present public feature: the snack bar. Ahh yes, the wonders of the Brazilian rainforest snack bars! They did have a sloth there snacking as well, and he seemed quite interested in Kaston’s hair! (Or he did until a handler brought him some food, which he proceeded to eat… very… slowly…)
Past that there was a fun pair of [giant otters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_otter) - a male and a female 7 and 5 years old respectively (out of an average lifetime of 12 years in the wild and 21 in captivity). We saw more varieties of monkeys, some vampire bats, a [Goliath bird-eating spider](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater) (the largest spider in the world), turtles, and stingrays.
We had been working our way down, and eventually we found ourselves staring through a huge glass (well, probably acryllic) wall right into the river exhibit tank with the manatees! We hadn’t been able to see it from above, but there were several other varieties of enormous fish, turtles, and stingrays sharing the tank with the stars of the attraction.
We went out from there to look at a collection of fishtanks with displays from around the world: Fiji, Japan, the Bahamas, etc. There was even a “predators” tank with eels, pirahnas, lionfish, etc. that we were able to walk through in a little tunnel.
We went outside briefly to see their outdoor penguin exhibit. Now, I love penguins, but it was kinda sad seeing the relatively few birds they had huddling in the shadows to escape the sun’s heat. I dunno, maybe those kind of penguins are used to a warmer climate, but I couldn’t help but feel like that was *not* their natural habitat.
They had a “Mayan” section that was basically just snakes and jackrabbits and such, although it did have a couple of interesting exhibits. One was a huge shark aquarium tunnel (much larger than the other aquarium tunnel they had) that we sat in for a while to watch the sharks swim around and above us. Another smaller tank had some small hammerhead sharks and varieties of stingrays (with a sign on the tank saying that it was not a petting tank…) The other really interesting thing there was unexpected for a place calling itself an aquarium - they had a female jaguar. We sat and watched her pace her cage for some time; honestly, she looked sad. Kaston mentioned that she wouldn’t look you in the eye. After 5 minutes or so, the jaguar headed up a ramp and out of the public exhibit. She seemed very lonely…
That was pretty much the end of the aquarium (aside from some very noisy flamingos), so we recycled our guidebook (which I don’t think we even opened once) and headed out. We’d payed for all day parking, so we decided to go for a walk and see if we found anything interesting. The first place to catch Kaston’s eye was - you guessed it - an apartment complex! Well, she absolutely loves looking at floorplans and touring apartments (even if there’s no intention at all to actually move into them), so we went and looked at two very interesting apartments which, while I suppose they might have been relatively cheap for the west end in Dallas, were a lot more expensive (albiet with more interesting floorplans) than the places you find in the suburbs.
After that we were starting to get a little hungry, so we started looking for a place to eat. Well, the West End in Dallas has a *ton* of restaraunts! There are a lot of local grills and cantinas and steakhouses, plus your normal chains like TGI Fridays, Joe’s Crab Shack, and On The Border, but they’re all in these old historic brick buildings which made even the chain restaraunts look unique and different. We ended up going to Spaghetti Warehouse and just having some spaghetti and meat sauce for lunch, which was very tasty.
After lunch we found a small shopping center and took a look around there. The whole bottom floor of the place was a big antique store, and the other stores were generally unique places with interesting imports and such. There was a candy store there too, so we got some various taffies to take home with us. We walked around the west end for a little while longer and spotted a place called [the West End Comedy Theatre](http://westendcomedy.com/) that we might have to stop by sometime. By this point our feet were getting pretty tired though, so we decided to call it a day and head home.
Well, I said back at the beginning that we didn’t sit around and play Kingdom Hearts 2 or World of Warcraft, but we actually did do a little of that once we got home. We played Kingdom Hearts 2 for a couple of hours until it got dark outside and we were hungry enough to think about dinner. Kaston had picked up a cheap charcoal grill from WalMart earlier in the weekend, so we decided we would make some hot dogs. We sat outside in front of our garage, drank wine, cooked and ate hot dogs and marshmallows, and talked.
We did play a little more Kingdom Hearts 2 after that, but it wasn’t too long before we turned in for the night (and it was a good night’s sleep after all of the activity of the morning and afternoon and the relaxation of the evening!)
It was a really fun day - something very much out of the ordinary for Kaston and I. We’re going to try to start setting aside one weekend a month or so to go do something different like this for a day.
