My girlfriend and I spent some time at the Long Beach Aquarium recently. It's not just fish! We saw poisonous ants, snakes, a buttered-popcorn-smelling bearcat, a cute little marsupial (pictured), and a huge aviary.
This is a Dusky Pademelon. The handlers wear thick protective gloves, it
wears a restraining harness, and you still want to walk up and pet him.
I got a lot of really great pictures, but more than that was the experience. It's really nice to be enchanted by something; when you're an adult, that doesn't happen so often. Seeing live jellyfish, seeing water dragons, and petting sharks and manta rays did it for me.
Interesting to note: yes, the cafeteria there does sell seafood, but they make a point of advertising that it's sustaining. (The last place in the world I'd expect to eat a species to extinction is at the aquarium.) Also weird: the napkins in the dispensers at said cafeteria were from Weinerschnitzel.
