Creatures of the deep

We went to the London aquarium today. I loved, loved, loved the experience. I am a child when it comes to sea life and fishes. As a child I used to play sea adventures throughout all the summer holidays. When it was sunny and hot, my brothers and I played it in the swimming pool. We were pirates, fighting pirates, or modern day pirates, or other sorts of evildoers, when we were not fighting man eating sharks (some white foam board, in lieu of great white). I mentioned it before, in French (here and there) and in English here. I have never been much of a sailorman myself, although I love to swim, but the idea of sea adventures always fascinated me. I spent many rainy afternoons watching Moby Dick, before I ever read the original novel.

All this to say that I loved my time at the aquarium. I was like a fish in the water. I was fascinated by the sharks, especially the sand tiger sharks, which almost looked like a great white on the blurry pictures I took. Talking about pictures, that was a challenge. I am not much of a photographer to begin with and taking a few snapshots of something as quick as a fish is especially tricky. So most of the pictures we took are not very good. But in the case of sharks, it gives the illusion of danger: it looks like the pics were taken at sea, close to a terrible predator. So my shortcomings as a photographer actually gave the images some threatening beauty. Or maybe I am kidding myself. Anyway, I put a picture of one of those sharks here, so you can judge for yourself.

There were also piranhas (another adversary in our childhood games), turtles, rays, eels, clownfish, crabs, a very shy octopus which we could not find (strange thing an octopus, I always think of them as dangerous Kraken-like creatures, always ferocious and ill-intended, in my imagination they are always more like this) and I forget so many other because I can't name them all. Ah yes, and there was also in one of the ponds the carcass of a whale, I presume that it was not an authentic one (although I am not sure and cannot be bothered to research it right now), but nevertheless it gave the place a unique atmosphere. It was like being in the ocean. We spent two hours there, but we could have spent the whole day. I wished we could have taken a dip in some of the ponds. Okay, maybe it is pushing the fantasy a bit, but it was really that nice.