An oceanarium in English is called an Aquarium. And really — why overcomplicate it? An aquarium is an aquarium, even if it takes up as much space as a football stadium, and has several thousand species of fish in it (2100, to be exact). Funny enough, the word Oceanarium does exist in bourgeois lingo too, but it specifically means the ocean part of an aquarium, so they still one-upped us there.
For fans of the aquarium there is a special site, I'm bringing it up for the sake of the logo
Anyway, we got to the Shedd Aquarium on foot,
because the water taxi wasn't running due to choppy water, and the trolley bus takes a long time to wait for, and it's slow too. Maybe this was the wrong decision — by the time we walked there in the city heat, we were already a bit tired, and walking around the aquarium wasn't as fun anymore. While we were trudging along, we saw homeless people under an overpass and the pedestrian bridge from the post before last.
On the left you can see the aquarium's cafeteria
Sea Horz
We got inside without waiting in line, and it's called something weird — will call, as I was clued in by the comments to my previous post. Now a few facts about the aquarium. It opened on May 30, 1930 and was (surprise!) the biggest in the world. It gets 2 million visitors a year and is the second most popular attraction in Chicago after the natural history museum. Which is weird, to me colorful fish are prettier, though the museum has some stuff to see too.
Some kind of crocodile-like fish, history hasn't preserved its name
To bring you this remarkable fact, I had to do some internet archeology. In case anyone doesn't know, there are ways to dig up any page, even if it's no longer at its official address.
The first is Coral Cache. It's a caching system where the participants are volunteers. To dig up a vanished site, go to the official site and enter the address. The downsides — not all sites are there, and sometimes it's super laggy.
God knows what this is, but it looks cool
The second is Google Cache. As the name implies, this is the cache of the Google search engine. Oddly enough, Google, just like other search giants, stores the entire internet, or at least what it can — otherwise it wouldn't be able to search. To dig up a vanished site, type cache: and then the site address into the Google search bar. For example cache:www.example.com. The cons: there are no brand new or really old sites, nor ones that have search engine indexing disabled.
The third is the Internet Archive, an organization that archives the internet. Day after day, tireless robots meticulously inspect and hoard pages. And this is truly a Sisyphean task, because the internet only gets bigger over time, and it's completely impossible to save it all. Wanna see what the Microsoft website looked like in 1996? No problem. It's easy to use — just go there and type in the address. The cons — not all pages are there, only the popular ones, plus the site archives them relatively rarely.
This is a cichlid, a very popular tropical fish for aquariums
At the aquarium, we first checked out the Wild Reef, if memory serves. I have a feeling we missed one of the 5 permanent exhibits, the Caribbean Reef, or maybe my beauty-overloaded brain just shut down at that point. Coral reefs are fantastically beautiful (which anyone who's watched Cousteau shows has seen), and in the center of the exhibit there's a huge tank that even has sharks.
After the Wild Reef, which is in the basement, we took the elevator up and looked at African and local fish. In Wisconsin, the climate is a bit warmer than ours, and there's a lot of wildlife, but the Great Lakes are big, it's colder in them and there are fewer critters.
Soon the dolphin show started, and we hurried to the right part of the building. The Aquarium has dolphins, beluga whales, and fur seals. The host was totally killing it — hyping up the crowd, who eagerly howled, and yelled Yes and No. He'd have a harder time back home, what with our chilly Baltic temperament. The dolphins didn't disappoint — they jumped in all sorts of ways, wagged their tails in different directions, and even swam tail-up. The host made a special point that the people working with the dolphins during the show spend the rest of their time cleaning, washing, and scrubbing up after their critters, so it's not as fun a profession as it might look from the outside.
Dolphins
Belugas
A girl is scratching a beluga's tongue, and it's loving it
Three belugas have already been born at the aquarium, which is no surprise given they live expansively — the pools are several times larger than the legally required sizes, just like most of the tanks at Shedd. The main pool is a whole 11 million liters — not too shabby. On the other hand, that's only slightly more than the amount the Amazon unleashes per second from its main waterfall.
Then we went and looked at the Amazon Rising exhibit, where aside from fish there were all sorts of poison frogs and trees growing in the water. We were lied to, though — the Amazon wasn't rising, but my sister vaguely remembers that in one of the places she visited there was a show like that.
Vibing
Also in the aquarium there was Granddad, aka the Grandpa. This is the oldest aquatic animal of any aquarium in the world. Granddad was brought to the aquarium for the 1933 World's Fair. Granddad is a lungfish. Funny enough, I did a presentation on these fish in school, and therefore figured out how it translates into Russian without a dictionary, which I consider no small achievement — I doubt any of my fellow immigrants could have. For extra fun, try to guess, and then check the dictionary. Those who get it right, check in in the comments by shouting "I knew it!" — the country should know its heroes. Don't write the name of the fish class in the comments — don't ruin the guessing for others.
Some jerk was taking pictures of Granddad with a flash. May he become a fish in his next life!
There was also a section with lizards, all sorts of them — big and small, different colors, including blue ones. It camouflages well, hard to spot.
Chameleoning
Right there you could also see a Komodo Dragon — the world's largest lizard, from Indonesia, measuring over two meters . It's a predator, and could easily kill and eat a human, though in captivity their temper improves. On the monitors they were showing the mating games of two of these — looked more like a battle of Godzillas.
Pity the scale isn't visible. If anyone knows what size the palm tree is, they'll understand.
Curiously, I recently started watching the BBC documentary series Planet Earth, and there was also stuff about big lizards there, only living in the cold mountain rivers of Japan. The series is beautiful and interesting, especially when you watch it on a 40-inch TV, ho ho. Highly recommend it to everyone, you can download it from www.torrents.ru.
We also grabbed a bite at the aquarium. If I were the Americans, I'd only feed people fish there, but jokes are alien to them, so as always there were a few franchises to choose from. I ate a salad with locally fried chips - made from potatoes, not powder. The salad was alright, the chips too, and not knowing what a franchise is nowadays is a shame.