Visit To London Aquarium

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Visit to The London Aquarium

I had never visited the London Aquarium before, but because I was so keen to do “Underwater” I decided to give a treat to my sisters and myself by flooding our senses!

Aside from the groups of school children and thousands of families eagerly waiting to be allowed inside one at a time, stepping into the aquarium felt, for a moment, like swimming in the ocean.  It was fantastic!

The entry is light-hearted to downright goofy... 
A guard in misty ostrich feathers keeps the queue orderly in the pleasantest way... 
A car complete with sunroof has been turned into a giant aquarium... 
Potpourri with citrus rinds is served up in shells... 
A videogame's "joystick"? -- a paddle for "riding the rapids"!

Displayed in tanks from floor to ceiling, the London Aquarium is home to hundreds of different varieties of fish and sea life from around the world. The aquarium is split into different displays each of which represents an area of the world's aquatic life including the Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean. The London Aquarium's Pacific Ocean display is 5 metres deep, holds 1 million litres of marine water, and contains tiger sharks, brown sharks, a nurse shark and the only zebra sharks in the UK.

London Aquarium is not only one of the newest and largest aquaria in Europe, but also one of the finest. It is housed in the cellars of the old County Hall right beside the conspicuous London Eye, overlooking the Thames and within sight of the Houses of Parliament, in short the best location for an aquarium you could imagine in London. The house obviously was not built to accommodate an aquarium, but somehow the plan worked, so when you walked around down there you don't feel in any way that it wasn't created for the purpose, - no endless straight corridors with equidistant.

There are 3 floors, but the main parts of the tanks are concentrated on two subterranean floors connected by stairs. In the centre there are basically two large tanks, one (the largest) with Atlantic open sea fauna, the other with pacific (sharks). Around the outer wall (and to some degree also inwards towards the centre) there are smaller aquaria representing just about any water biotope you could imagine. When you enter you first walk through a long tunnel with little to see, -probably to accustom your eyes to the scarce light. Then you arrive at a section describing the history of London as the history of its sewers, with detailed accounts of how the growing pollution of the water affected people's lives. All this is explained on the wall to your right, while a 25 m long stream divided in several sections follows the wall to your left. The following tanks mostly concentrate on temperate waters, though tanks representing the tropical waters soon pop up. When you have closed the circle you walk down the stairs to the bottom level, and here you, among other things, an appended section describing the coral reefs of this planet.

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        London Aquarium offers you the chance to come face to face with the amazing creatures found under the water and touch rays, starfish and crabs in the seashore and in the ray pool areas!

The creature that surprised me the most was the Moray Eel. The eel was attracting a lot of the visitors, as it was extremely weird and quite amusing. Whenever a person went to get a close view of it, the eel simply just gazed at you and opened its wide mouth as if it was about to eat you!

The creature that frightened me ...

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