Wolf and Fish
I met Wolf on Saturday. He's on vacation at the moment, and according to him, very bored, so he invited me out to some place called Aquaria, near the Twin Towers. (As a matter of fact it's very nearly in the same compound.)
Anyway, we arrived at the Twin Towers via the subway at about 9 a.m, and then only did we find out that the place opens at 10. (The souvenir shop opens about ten minutes before the rest of the place--typical.) We spent the extra time having breakfast and catching up, more or less. We didn't talk much about what we've been doing over the past months or so, since those topics were covered during the ten-minute trip on the subway.
(Unlike females, neither Wolf nor I see any point in analysing every detail of the past few thousand seconds.)
My own breakfast that morning was a bowl of oats, eaten in my hostel room; Wolf's was a cup of hot Milo and a peanut-paste bun. Unfortunately, the label read Peanut Bun and consequently led to a most unfortunate misunderstanding, namely that Wolf doesn't like peanut paste.
It turns out that I'm not the only one around who likes amateur psychology; Wolf recently bought a book entitled Please Understand Me, Vol. 2, and he seems to have memorised it. I, on the other hand, have conducted a bit of online research into personality tests, so we had a pretty good time discussing the book and each other's types.
(He's an INTJ and I'm an ISTJ. I've got a window open right now detailing the profiles of both, and it's amazing the difference one little letter makes. For simplicity's sake, he's a Rational Mastermind and I'm an Inspector Guardian. If you don't know what these terms mean then go Google them. Otherwise, take my word for it, we're very different.)
It also turns out that people like Wolf are about ten times less widespread than people like me; but even so I'm a rarity. Not that I haven't noticed yet, of course.
We didn't know the way to Aquaria at all, so we had to ask the guards littered around. And then we decided, what the heck, and assumed foreign accents whenever within hearing range of the guards.
"Pard'n me, good sir, but would you kindly inform us on the way to the sharks?...Thank you." All delivered in (what our limited exposure to the movies assures us) was a pretty good facsimile of an upper-class British accent. It probably sounded stupid coming out of our mouths, but what the heck, it amused us, and we did it at least five or six times.
We eventually got to Aquaria, and the first thing we both saw was the entry fees: 28 bucks for local adults (I'm sorry to say that I am now adult). The second thing we saw was the cashier, who told us that local adult students get to pay only 20--a difference of 8! Plus we got a free CD each--but since the school's computers are sadly lacking in the hardware department, I haven't played it yet.
Aquaria, as the name implies, is this big fishtank. We stepped in and looked, and lo and behold we saw lizards and frogs, serenely basking in the artificial light, on artificial plants, and if the bugs weren't moving I'd say they were eating artificial food too.
We went through corridors filled with bugs of all kinds (snakes, lizards, crabs, turtles, tarantulas--hairy!--and a couple of chameleons who were apparently colourblind because they didn't blend into the background at all) before we got to the good part.
Aquaria's main section is entered through a narrow staircase, and right beside that was this big transparent cylinder full of fish. The fish were obviously experimenting with different ways to swim, because they kept on alternating between clockwise and counter-clockwise directions. All the same, the effect was amazing.
After that, we passed by tanks and tanks of fish. Starfish, horseshoe crabs (Wolf assures me that horseshoe crabs are the oldest surviving species on Earth), mini manta rays, and a few turtles and tortoises. (We had a time trying to tell them apart until I noticed the little label stuck on the tank.)
The really nice thing about Aquaria is that it has this huge, huge tank full of fish and sharks and stuff, and people can walk through it in a kind of Plexiglas tunnel, so you get this 3D effect. Almost like diving while staying dry.
The tunnel floor is divided into a conveyor belt and a stationary floor, and we took turns standing on both, depending on what we were looking at. The small fish weren't too much to look at, except when I thought they were swimming in a particularly neat formation; the sharks and mantas were the real attention-grabbers. They certainly grabbed the kids' eyes.
Some of the sharks kept on swimming up close to the glass barrier (it was roughly one inch thick, so everything we saw was 30% smaller than its actual size) so we could properly check out their lovely sharp teeth. Did you know that even sharks have cruel or kind eyes? Wolf and I kept on sorting them out into those categories. And those teeth... if I had teeth like those, I'd never have needed braces, mostly because braces wouldn't have lasted a day on jaws that size.
We went through the tunnel twice just to properly look at the sharks. (The mantas were nice in their own way, but the smiley-face on their bottom gets old after awhile.) We even saw the feeding time... and those sharks must've been really full or bored of the food, because the sharks we saw didn't do more than half-heartedly snap at the fish halves that the feeder dangled at them.
A pity.
Anyway, we took 1 hour and 49 minutes to go through the place--roughly spending 25 cents a minute--and it wasn't bad. I like the place, but I wish I had a camera so I wouldn't need to go back again; my neck hurts from gazing upwards.
By the way, Cheeky has recovered from dengue and turned up at school today, looking a tad paler (but still darker than I). If nothing else, he at least learned that his blood type is B+.
Anyway, we arrived at the Twin Towers via the subway at about 9 a.m, and then only did we find out that the place opens at 10. (The souvenir shop opens about ten minutes before the rest of the place--typical.) We spent the extra time having breakfast and catching up, more or less. We didn't talk much about what we've been doing over the past months or so, since those topics were covered during the ten-minute trip on the subway.
(Unlike females, neither Wolf nor I see any point in analysing every detail of the past few thousand seconds.)
My own breakfast that morning was a bowl of oats, eaten in my hostel room; Wolf's was a cup of hot Milo and a peanut-paste bun. Unfortunately, the label read Peanut Bun and consequently led to a most unfortunate misunderstanding, namely that Wolf doesn't like peanut paste.
It turns out that I'm not the only one around who likes amateur psychology; Wolf recently bought a book entitled Please Understand Me, Vol. 2, and he seems to have memorised it. I, on the other hand, have conducted a bit of online research into personality tests, so we had a pretty good time discussing the book and each other's types.
(He's an INTJ and I'm an ISTJ. I've got a window open right now detailing the profiles of both, and it's amazing the difference one little letter makes. For simplicity's sake, he's a Rational Mastermind and I'm an Inspector Guardian. If you don't know what these terms mean then go Google them. Otherwise, take my word for it, we're very different.)
It also turns out that people like Wolf are about ten times less widespread than people like me; but even so I'm a rarity. Not that I haven't noticed yet, of course.
We didn't know the way to Aquaria at all, so we had to ask the guards littered around. And then we decided, what the heck, and assumed foreign accents whenever within hearing range of the guards.
"Pard'n me, good sir, but would you kindly inform us on the way to the sharks?...Thank you." All delivered in (what our limited exposure to the movies assures us) was a pretty good facsimile of an upper-class British accent. It probably sounded stupid coming out of our mouths, but what the heck, it amused us, and we did it at least five or six times.
We eventually got to Aquaria, and the first thing we both saw was the entry fees: 28 bucks for local adults (I'm sorry to say that I am now adult). The second thing we saw was the cashier, who told us that local adult students get to pay only 20--a difference of 8! Plus we got a free CD each--but since the school's computers are sadly lacking in the hardware department, I haven't played it yet.
Aquaria, as the name implies, is this big fishtank. We stepped in and looked, and lo and behold we saw lizards and frogs, serenely basking in the artificial light, on artificial plants, and if the bugs weren't moving I'd say they were eating artificial food too.
We went through corridors filled with bugs of all kinds (snakes, lizards, crabs, turtles, tarantulas--hairy!--and a couple of chameleons who were apparently colourblind because they didn't blend into the background at all) before we got to the good part.
Aquaria's main section is entered through a narrow staircase, and right beside that was this big transparent cylinder full of fish. The fish were obviously experimenting with different ways to swim, because they kept on alternating between clockwise and counter-clockwise directions. All the same, the effect was amazing.
After that, we passed by tanks and tanks of fish. Starfish, horseshoe crabs (Wolf assures me that horseshoe crabs are the oldest surviving species on Earth), mini manta rays, and a few turtles and tortoises. (We had a time trying to tell them apart until I noticed the little label stuck on the tank.)
The really nice thing about Aquaria is that it has this huge, huge tank full of fish and sharks and stuff, and people can walk through it in a kind of Plexiglas tunnel, so you get this 3D effect. Almost like diving while staying dry.
The tunnel floor is divided into a conveyor belt and a stationary floor, and we took turns standing on both, depending on what we were looking at. The small fish weren't too much to look at, except when I thought they were swimming in a particularly neat formation; the sharks and mantas were the real attention-grabbers. They certainly grabbed the kids' eyes.
Some of the sharks kept on swimming up close to the glass barrier (it was roughly one inch thick, so everything we saw was 30% smaller than its actual size) so we could properly check out their lovely sharp teeth. Did you know that even sharks have cruel or kind eyes? Wolf and I kept on sorting them out into those categories. And those teeth... if I had teeth like those, I'd never have needed braces, mostly because braces wouldn't have lasted a day on jaws that size.
We went through the tunnel twice just to properly look at the sharks. (The mantas were nice in their own way, but the smiley-face on their bottom gets old after awhile.) We even saw the feeding time... and those sharks must've been really full or bored of the food, because the sharks we saw didn't do more than half-heartedly snap at the fish halves that the feeder dangled at them.
A pity.
Anyway, we took 1 hour and 49 minutes to go through the place--roughly spending 25 cents a minute--and it wasn't bad. I like the place, but I wish I had a camera so I wouldn't need to go back again; my neck hurts from gazing upwards.
By the way, Cheeky has recovered from dengue and turned up at school today, looking a tad paler (but still darker than I). If nothing else, he at least learned that his blood type is B+.
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