Happy Birthday to me!

Today is my birthday and to celebrate, yesterday I forced my family (ie my reluctant husband) to go to the brand spankin' new Greater Cleveland Aquarium which opened on Saturday. Despite the long wait to even BUY tickets (1 hour if you were purchasing on site instead of having purchased ahead online) we had a pretty good time.

The National Aquarium this place is not. Much smaller, the experience felt more confined because of the low ceilings painted black and there was something not quite finished about the whole thing - maybe the cloudy water that was reminiscent of a fish tank that has only just been set up and not allowed to filter and settle before being shown off, maybe the lack of real plants and presence of so many artificial plants, maybe the lack of signage on some of the exhibits so that you didn't know what the fish you were looking at were (or even what you should be looking for in the case of the octopus tank) - but it was still great. I mean some of those are quirks that will be worked out and some are just part of having been forward thinking enough to use an existant old historic factory building rather than demolishing it and starting over.

And hey, as long as the lines were we still parked super close which has got to be a first for a museum/aquarium visit for us.

There was a sort of big deal made in the paper about how the exhibits were more "like movie sets" than large fishtanks and I wasn't feeling that vibe at all. Unless you mean while you were walking through the underwater tunnel I got a sudden "Jaws 3" vibe, I don't know where the movie set feeling was supposed to come in.

And seriously, if the water had been higher at the top of the tube I would have been stoked to watch sharks swim over me. But the 7' ceiling had bubbles skating across it so there was no way for that to happen. Alas.

Actually it felt more like a really big exotic fish store, due to the open tank tops at heights I could have reached my hand into. You gotta work with the space you have when you are reusing instead of rebuilding, so I don't think that's too much of a negative. And the shark exhibit makes up for it - a massive wall of thick glass you can literally lean right up against. Even the National Aquarium doesn't let you get that close to the sharks.

Another bonus - you can actually take pictures of the animals without the thick glass warping everything the way it does at the National Aquarium. So, yay!

And on the unique side, the fact that they have integrated the history of the factory building and the local waterway history into the aquarium is awesome. Tidbits about the building are featured throughout on signs and exhibit space and live actors in old naval costumes wander through and tell you some history. Interaction at it's best.

I kind of rate the whole thing a B+, losing points only for the artificial feeling and incompleteness and none at all for the size. Because a small aquarium is better than no aquarium at all.