The New England Aquarium (or, PENGUINS!)

Glow-y Jellyfish

Sorry for the delay in posting, but it's been a crazy busy week.  As I mentioned before, my sister was in town for about 10 days, and we tried to pack as much as we could into her visit.  So, even though I did not post last week, I now have a bunch of posts just waiting to be written.  This one is all about our visit to the New England Aquarium.

One of the first things that we noticed about the Aquarium was that is was actually fairly small.  The exhibits focus on penguins, fish, and jellyfish, and there are two seal tanks.  However, there are no dolphins, which I found very disappointing because I love dolphins.  Even though it was small, the Aquarium has just been renovated, and what they have is very well done.

Nemo's cousin from Boston

First of all, I want to note that the Aquarium includes a huge IMAX theatre and whale watching tours, both of which cost extra money on top of the basic Aquarium ticket.  We got out tickets through the library (more on that later), so we were not able to do either of these extras, but they are on our to-list for another trip.

King Penguin

The first exhibit that we saw were the penguins, and they were as fantastic as you would expect penguins to be.  They had three different kinds, all of which were pretty small.  My favorites were the Rockhoppers, who randomly freaked out and started darting and jumping all over their tank.  There was also one that was very old and never moved from his one spot.  I'm no penguinologist, but I'm pretty sure that he was their king.

The next part of our tour was a huge tank in the middle of the aquarium.  In this tank was a variety of different sea creatures, including giant sea turtles.  It was a circular tank with a ramp spiraling up towards the top.  As you walked up the ramp, you could see the different fish at each level, which was very cool.  Once you made it to the top, the tank was completely open and had a viewing platform around it.  You could lean over and look all the way down to the bottom of the tank (or at least try - it was a very big tank, after all).

Looking down into the tank

One of the most touted parts of the aquarium is the shark and stingray touch-tank, which is exactly what it sounds like.  There is a shallow tank filled with stingrays and small sharks that you can actually reach your hand in and pet as they swim by.  The sharks were being losers and sleeping under rocks when we went, but the stingrays, surprisingly, really seemed to enjoy the attention.  They kept swimming around the tank in a big circle so that they could come back for another pet.  If you're wondering, they feel a lot like dolphins - very soft and smooth.  It was weird at first, but definitely worth doing.

Friendly Stingray

Finally, we saw the seal tanks.  There were two - one outside of the entrance to the aquarium and one that was also outside, but you had to walk through the aquarium to get to it.  The seals were generally being seals: playing around and getting their heads stuck in buckets.  It was pretty adorable.  There was also one HUGE seal that was just lying near the water, not moving.  My sister thought that he was dead, and I thought that he was actually some sort of seal-costume for the trainers.  It turns out that he was very much real and alive, just super lazy.  I also thing he was their king.

Finally, I just want to give a quick note about the library museum passes.  I have written about these passes before, and we had some slight problems with them over this last week.  So, I have two additional tips for renting the BPL museum passes:

Seals gonna seal

1.  Check museum hours before you rent a pass.  This is particularly true if you are renting a pass from a branch library or from a branch that you are not familiar with.  We got passes for Monday and were planning on picking them up on Sunday.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the branch we used was not open on Sunday and did not open until noon on Monday.  So, we got a much later start than we had hoped.
2. Make sure that you can get to the library branch to pick up the passes.  This seems pretty obvious, but I had naively assumed that getting to most of the BPL branches would involve a fairly simply MBTA ride.  I was wrong.  I was so wrong.  It took so long for us to ride multiple buses to pick up a tour pass that we missed the tour.  So, only use libraries you can get to easily, or be prepared for one hell of a journey.

Any other experience at the New England Aquarium?  Has anyone done the IMAX or whale-watching parts?  Would you recommend them?

"Goodbye, friends!"