Chicago--Day 2

On the second day of our min-vacation, we decided to visit the Shedd Aquarium. It was supposed to be a somewhat rainy day, so we figured it was appropriate to spend the day inside. On the walk to the aquarium I got to see some of the city.

It's huge.

I mean, really huge.

The aquarium did not disappoint. It was really, really cool. I have to admit that my focus was less on the displays themselves and more on Abby. It's so fun to see her reaction to new things. She gets so excited!

I did manage to take a few pictures of the fish...click to see them larger.

The next one is one of Abby's favorites.

(Interestingly, I didn't notice the eel beneath the crab until last night when I looked at this picture for probably the 5th time!)

While we were at the aquarium, we went to the "Dolphin Show." It turned out to be a bit of a letdown. Basically, it was a dolphin training session except that they had a guy standing in front of the audience narrating the training methods. Like that they use a whistle to reward the dolphin so they associate the whistle with positive things like fish and pats. Sure, all that information is cool, the problem is that they never really showed us the result of all this training! They had a couple of jumping sessions, but that's it. Seriously, about 30 seconds of the whole half hour show was dolphins doing tricks. I mean, I guess maybe they don't want to "exploit" the dolphins or emphasize that they can do tricks? But why the heck are they spending all this time training them to do tricks if they're never going to show them to the visitors?? And they should rename the show to "Dolphin Training 101."

Here are the shots that I got during the 30 seconds of fun.

After we were all aquarium-ed out, we headed over to Millennium Park. It's a cool place, evidenced by the many other people that were also there (even though it was sprinkling rain)! The bean thing, whatever it's really called, was pretty cool. Abby was asleep by that point though, so she didn't get to see it.

There was also this really interesting fountain. There were two pillars with water running down them and a sort of reflecting pool between them. What was interesting was that each of them had a face on it. A video of a real face. And every now and then, the face would open it's mouth and water would spout out of it. Interesting. The other face was an old white guy, by the way. Did I mention I thought it was interesting?

All in all, an excellent day, followed up by dinner at an Indian restaurant. The best part is it was BYOB, so we had excellent beverages to boot.