Fish are Friends, not Food.

On our first day in Baltimore, we went to the national aquarium. It really is a world-class museum. The exhibits went beyond being just informative, they were visually stunning and some were just plain innovative. They had a few that were like walking into a giant terrarium, incorporating native plants, animals and birds into the habitat. They even adjusted the climate of these exhibits, to make you feel totally immersed in the environment.

It was a fun way to spend the day. My favorites were the lion fish, the dolphin tank, and the seahorses. I had least favorites too....

3 Scariest Creatures at the National Aquarium

1. Southern Stingrays, 6 feet long. Totally thought the people swimming in the tank were going to get Irwined.



2. Blind Tetras. Little fish that are born with eyes but lose them weeks into life.


3. Mud-skippers, evolution's most indecisive freak.

If you are ever in Baltimore, I would say that this is the best thing to see. We spent the whole day there and enjoyed it greatly.

That night, we drove out to the Broadway Diner for dinner - featured on "Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives"



We got an unbelievable amount of delicious food for cheap. The portions are huge, and it made me sad we didn't have a fridge in our hotel room. It's a neat place, an intersection of fine dining and greasy diner in a surprisingly complimentary way.

Clearly I will go Sailing no more...

Paul and I got back from our trip earlier this eve. We saw the ocean, gambled in casinos, sat in a tropical orchid garden, ate many nice meals and visited new places. All without ever setting foot on the cruise ship we originally planned to vacation on.

Long story short, there was a mix up with our reservation and we never made it on to the ship's manifest. The Bermudan getaway we were set to embark on was happening on the same ship, port, day, and time in the year 2011. Even though from the start there was zero likelihood that we were going to travel on the boat, we spent 4.5 hours in the terminal being told by employees that we were "all set" and they were just finding a nicer room to upgrade us to. That's 10:30 to 3:00 with no food, spare a piece of cake we snatched from the welcome aboard reception, and little acknowledgment from the crew about what the status of our situation was. Oh, PS- they made us sit that whole time in the area they were holding people to be tested for symptoms of swine flu. Awesome.

We weren't the only ones who were unable to board. Some people were denied vacations for having a hospital birth certificates instead of a state issued one. They offered us their cabins, since they would be allowed to go, but the guest services guy told us that since we weren't on the manifest we wouldn't be allowed on board. Mind you, this was in the fourth hour of us sitting there with luxury upgrades being hinted at. If they had just told us that in the first place, it would have been a lot easier to handle. We wouldn't have wasted our day at the pier, and we could have retrieved our luggage, which sailed away without us.

We were actually very lucky though. Some people, like I mentioned, were barred from boarding, and their luggage was set to sail away with their life-saving medications or their passports in them. One family even had 6 young children let on board with both parents obstructed from entry. And because of the our real reservation was a year away, we were actually able to get a full refund, which nobody else could say, really.

I really did feel like I was in a Randy Newman song though...

So there we were, down in Baltimore with a week of vacation days, one set of clothes each, and a non-refundable two night stay in Washington DC booked for 5 days in the future. Faced with the prospect of trusting Royal Caribbean to ship our bags back (and also the prospect of them charging us a huge fee for the pleasure), and in spite of the strong urge to cut our losses and flee home for a stay-cation, we decided to make our most of our time down in the mid-Atlantic. We wanted to get our bags in person when the boat came back to port.

It made for a very unorthodox and random vacation to places we never would have gone otherwise. It was quite an adventure planning travel without a computer or the internet. And despite the bad beginning, it did turn out to be a pretty fun trip. Like I said, we did all the things that a cruise vacation invokes, just in a different place entirely.

I'll be blogging a little bit of what we ended up doing over the next few days. Like this trip, I ended up not taking pictures. It's strange when that happens.

Bodliean Baby

I've been reminiscing a fair bit about Oxford lately. It might just be because I'm about to travel again, and my mind is drifting back to other places I've been. I missed it so much I even watched the terrible Elijah Wood mystery movie, "Oxford Murders" (2008) just to see the scenery. Seriously, don't ever watch it. It's awful.


This was the view from the bed in my dorm room. I always knew what time it was.


One of the Oldest and most complete libraries in Great Britain...


The world coolest Natural History Museum...


Or maybe its the impending Harry Potter film that's got me thinking of Oxford. I got to see a lot of the places they filmed there, including the cloisters at New College, where Draco Malfoy gets his from Mad-eye Mooney. Though I suppose this last film won't really show much of Hogwarts...

PS, while we're on the topic - When did Neville Longbottom get so f-ing handsome? I'm very impressed with this!
Can't wait to see the film when we get back from our trip!

Cups and Balls

Paul and I watched "Penn and Tellers Magical History Tour" last night. It was a weird mix of documentary, magic show, and uncomfortably awkward personal monologue. The famous magicians go to Egypt to uncover the country's supposed ties with ancient magic. In the end, they basically conclude that the only reason we associate Egypt with magic is because magicians in the 70's drew hieroglyphs on their Aztec Tombs.

They meet a lot of street performers, including one that swallows and regurgitates snakes. But the real star of the show is the "cups and balls" illusion, that magicians have allegedly been doing since the time of pyramid wall paintings. Penn and Teller cap off the special by showing us their version of the cups and balls, done with complete transparency, right down to the clear plastic cups.

Even when they're telling you what they're doing, I still have a hard time catching them palming the balls. My eyes don't move fast enough I guess.



The weirdest part of this movie is that Teller talks!

Oj!

I recently re-read all of Rene Engstrom's wonderful webcomic dramedy "Anders Loves Maria".
If you haven't read it yet, you really should. It's a surprisingly complex love story of two Swedish art students and their strange social worlds. The art is really striking, and it's cool to read from the beginning and see Engstrom's style refine. I would describe it as a page turner, you (or at least I) get really invested in the characters and want them to come out of it all unscathed. It's a complete story too, with a really surprising end. The artist has a new comic "So Far Apart" that I haven't read yet, but want to soon.

Me?

Here's another classic Aardman animation. This actually might be my favorite of all their shorts, and the soundtrack has a fair bit to do with it. "Wat's Pig" (1996) is the story of twin brothers, separated as babies, and their diverging and converging lives. It's a great example of just how much in a story can be conveyed non-verbally. Only one word is used in the whole of it all.



Despite being the title character, you hardly see Wat's pet/mom pig at all. The split screen effect is creatively done too, and the sets are beautifully detailed. Claymation is so cool.

Birds of a Feather

I've been getting really into bird watching again. Right now, with the migrations and whatnot, we're getting a great number and variety of birds at our feeder. Yesterday, there was a huge flock of dark-eyed juncos (which really sounds like a slur) in the yard. At least 30 of them, scratching for food on the ground. When I went out to refill the feeder, they all took flight, and it was really quite amazing.



My new favorite at the feeder is the red-breasted nuthatch. I was always fond of its bigger, white breasted cousin and his habit for going down trees face first. This little guy has a cool racing stripe across his eyes that looks just like our state bird, the black-capped chickadee.



It's kind of cool actually, these two birds seems to have a verry friendly relationship in nature. It might have something to do with their similar markings, or maybe it's because their calls are alike, but there's lots of evidence that nuthatches are able to understand the distress calls that chickadees make. There has also been instances of the two species sharing nests and child rearing duties. And as a matter of fact, the nuthatches at our feeder seem to roam around with a gang of chickadee buddies. BFFs forever!