into a shark tank...an adventurous new year's eve

Yesterday, new year's eve, I finally convinced my dad to take me to Newport aquarium.

The aquarium has a display where you go into this room and stand on a metal floor which shakes around. In front of you is a projected image of bars and a great white. It is supposed to simulate cage diving. They missed a lot of the more interesting details, such as the cold and the way you can smell blood from the chum but there were a lot of kids having fun with it. I gave an impromptu talk about great whites until parents started pulling their kids away from me (guess they didn't think me encouraging them to go see great whites was a good idea).

We saw a really flat frog called the African Clawed Frog. It's the only frog with clawed toes and it looks like it's been run over by a car. It has a small head, no eyelids, and no tongue. There was also a Burmese python that weighed over 500 lbs and was 25 feet long. Horrifying. And when we went into the aviary two birds dive bombed my hat. The little kid behind me was like "they're going to poop on your head!" But they pooped on his dad instead. Ha.

There was a display with crocodiles hanging out on a front porch with a bunch of reindeer. Weird. And a santa in the shark tank so people could stand next to the tank and get their picture taken with underwater santa, who had a sleigh being pulled by two plastic sea horses that appeared to be scavenged from a trailer park in Miami. It kind of distracted from the sharks but I tried to not look at it.

Then we got to my favorite part of any aquarium, the shark petting pool. I displaced some annoying little boys and leaned over to look into the pool. There were three asian tourists standing next to me, a man and

two women, and they watched as I leaned over the pool to touch a shark. There was this beautiful little leopard shark that swam towards the surface when I put my fingers in the pool and I was able to pet the full length of him. I tried to get my dad to pet a shark but he said "No, I think they snap at people." I petted a pajama catshark because she looked traumatized. Then a lesser sand shark came by me and I tried to pet her, but, not realizing how deep the petting pool was, I accidentally stuck my arm in up to my elbow and then almost toppled over the wet kid sized railing into the pool (picture to the left taken by my dad moments before I almost fell in - you can see how deep my hand is in the water - the lesser sand shark is in the top right corner, and the pajama catshark is coming back by my hand to be pet again). The asian visitors were taking pictures of me so that was a little embarrassing. And my jacket kind of smells now.

But, one of the asian women finally got up the nerve to pet a shark. And then she looked at me and said "It's feeling nice!" I hope she goes back to her country and starts speaking out against definning and using shark cartilage as an aphrodisiac.