NPF ‘09 Gallery NPF ‘09 Itinerary

Read yesterday’s post here.

Day Ten: Ot-ters, ot-ters, ot-ters

(Say it fast with an American accent)

So I’m writing this on Day Eleven, because I didn’t get a chance yesterday. Recall that I did the segway tour the day before, got sunburnt… and from there I had a bad night’s sleep (big surprise, I know) and got up early. I checked out and left my luggage at the hotel, and headed to the Georgia Aquarium. It was pretty short walk, luckily, because I really was in no mood to get sunburned again. (I seriously look like a lobster)

The aquarium is the largest in the world, but amazingly enough, I prefer the one in Sydney. In Sydney you spend most of your time underneath the glass tanks, ’submerged’ in the aquarium; the Atlanta one is more like a bunch of exhibits, plus a two-minute submergence under the largest tank in the world. I have to admit, the latter is the best part: there is a giant wall of plexiglass (at least a metre thick) where you can sit and watch the fish. There were four whale sharks, large stingrays and some very big fish in there, which is pretty cool. You can see some video and more pics at Flickr (it was easier to get video than photos in some cases). The small exhibits were your average things you’d see in an aquarium part of a zoo; tropical fish displays, jellyfish, snakes and frogs, an Amazonian section, some otters. There were some belluga whales and sea urchin/starfish/etc displays too. 

I would have enjoyed it more if it weren’t for one thing: it was packed! Evidently - this being school holidays in America - everyone and their kid was there. Standing in line for my next activity (I’ll discuss more in a second) I looked out over the balcony, and saw hundreds of people below… and that’s not within the exhibits themselves, but in the main foyer area! Just trying to see even one of the displays meant standing around waiting for 20-30 people to move out the way. And no one was patient either; everyone blocked the passageways just trying to pile up around the glass. After a while it was just too annoying to cope with. (Hey, I’m patient, but when you have about 40 people walk past and say "Otters, otters, otters" in the space of fifteen minutes, it does get on your nerves a little)

Anyway, by the point I was getting really annoyed, it was time to go to the Aquarium’s 3D "Deepo Experience" (which is basically their way of saying it’s a 3D movie). The movie is an extra admission fee, but I love 3D stuff so I wanted to see it whilst I was there. (And actually, you can get a range of admission passes for the aquarium that make doing two or more activities cheaper depending on the pass… PS. You have to have your bag checked before entering the aquarium, and then you go through and get a picture taken, very customs-like. Actually, the picture is so that on your exit, you cough up money to purchase the photo. Which of course, I didn’t)

The 3D movie is about what you’d expect: it’s all about this marine biologist guide (who apparently was hired to explain the displays, even though he knows nothing about them ) who turns into a fish and gets taught all about ecology/saving the oceans by a bunch of different marine lifeforms. It’s like someone took Finding Nemo and crossed it with Shark Tales; an orange goldfish, funky songs sung by a trio of turtles, a misunderstood shark, and underwater luminescent fish. Combine that with a few surprise effects (real bubbles, some air blasted from behind, etc), and it was something that kids loved. It probably lasted about 15 minutes though, and I personally don’t think it was worth the $US 5.50 (hey, that translates to about $8 Australian, which is also the cost of a cheap movie ticket at home)… but hey. It was a good way to kill some time.

At this point I’m thinking lunch would be good. I head to the aquarium cafeteria, after being intrigued by seeing other people with yummy-looking brownies. But there’s a huge line. Not being in the mood to wait, I decide to head out to the Centennial Olympic Park, where I knew there was a cafe. I was right, but the food options were very limited. I ended up having a very bad hot dog.

The next part of my plan went well; I took the opportunity of being around a park/pond area, and did some nicer (ie. outdoors) shots of my shadow puppets. I found a particularly rocky waterfall part of the park and did them one by one. For the less underwater puppets, I found a tree and some leafy bushes, and did some shots there.

And here’s where it starts to go downhill again; I was pretty hot by this time and needed to put my puppets back in their box, so I went and found a series of undercover park benches (picnic tables actually). A family was sitting a little away from me, and whilst I was putting my puppets away, a young boy comes up to me and starts asking me what they were, etc. Well, I wasn’t in that much of a bad mood, and was happy to let him play a little with them. This went on for about 10 or 15 minutes, and the boy picked up my shadow puppet rods and started playing with them too: actually bending them quite horribly. Well, at this point I was losing patience - hey, I’m hot and tired here - so I started to pack up and gathered everything. But he liked my puppets so much, I thought why not let him have one. I gave him the long dog (which he’d stuck the tail of into his mouth anyway) and then he said he’d like another one and before I could say anything, grabbed one. I looked at it, and it was an unsellable one (a salvaged puppet that I could still use for pics, but wouldn’t dare try selling) and so let him have it… only it turns out it wasn’t the unsellable one! It was the mermaid that I had made for the exhibition, which on a quick glance, looks very much like the merman version, the one I actually did screw up.  So now I’ve given away a puppet that I could have sold, and am pissed off with myself for wasting the money/materials. Even though I don’t feel that stingy about doing things like that, I’m just mainly annoyed because I will be going home without a job, with enough money to pay my bills and that’s it, and not a lot of puppetry work on the horizon. This is not the point at which to treat my puppets like a hobby and not a business, and business means not giving away sellable puppets!

… Rant over… I was planning on spending the afternoon reading in the park, but had to get away from the noise and heat, so I just went back to the hotel where I sat in the lobby reading/dozing. By about 7pm it was time to leave (five hours waiting to leave in the lobby sure is fun ), and happily the hotel had a free shuttle that takes you anywhere within 3 miles of the accommodation. So they dropped me off at the Amtrak station… Yep, I took the train to DC.

Amtrak is bloody confusing. Here I was thinking it would be a little more like a central station, and it was more like something you’d expect in the middle of nowhere. I’m lucky that I remembered that I had to scan in my booking at a check-in machine (to get my official ticket, kind of like doing online check ins for flights), because otherwise I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do. There were a couple of people working the station, but none of them at the actual desks. People with lots of bags were just lining up, so I thought perhaps checking bags was done as you got on the train (although I read the Amtrak site thoroughly before leaving home, it didn’t explain anything about where/how to check bags in). When I finally realised I had to go to the station desks to do my baggage, the guy there unhelpfully just says, "Too late, we can put them on the next train tomorrow, or … (I forget what the ‘or’ was)" I assumed that meant I could take them on the train with me - bloody hoped so, because there was no way I was leaving any of my luggage behind. 

We go down a lift, and then onto the platform, where I have to go to the other end of the train - I booked a sleeper cabin - at which point one of the train attendants helped me lift my bags on the train. The actual train ticket/boarding pass didn’t have my cabin number listed on it that I saw: stupid idea number one. Luckily my eticket did, although I was so busy just trying to get my suitcase on the train I barely had a chance to look for it. Stupid idea number two: making the train passageways so small my bag actually scraped both sides of the walls (this is an average sized travel suitcase here, nothing out of the ordinary). Luckily I stepped into a cabin to let someone go past whilst I figured out where I was: and it just happened to be my cabin!

Well, it turns out the cabins are tinier than expected. Oh, if I’d had time to check my luggage in, it wouldn’t have been so bad. (The cabins are designed thus: two seats facing each other, next to the window. On the aisle side there is a small toilet/sink area, and a small bench opposite. Above the seats is a bed that pulls down as needed. The two seats pull out to form another bed) I ended up having the suitcase blocking the doorway, with my other bags sitting on the toilet/bench. Barely room to turn over in bed. The pictures here and on Flickr in no way convey just how small it really was.

The fun part was the night: I turned off all of the lights and listened to my podcast (Astronomy Cast, all about the cosmos) and watched the sky get darker. After a while I fell asleep, and it was a nice way to fall asleep. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the temperature of the cabin to be warm, so I spent most of the night quite cold and tossing and turning. The whole trip from Atlanta to DC is about 14 hours, hence the sleeping overnight thing. Despite all the issues, I’m glad I got a sleeper cabin instead of a normal seat, kind of like upgrading from economy to business on an airplane, because if nothing else I could stretch out on the bed and look out the window.

After a few more hours of travel from breakfast time, I arrived in DC’s Union Station and took a taxi to my B&B, where I currently am. I’m going out this evening, so an actual Day Eleven post will be added once I get back. Read next day’s post here.

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