Helllooooo to a week-long holiday for China’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival! It’s glorious, and much needed because we’re so frequently travelling separately on business trips and busy with work that we don’t get that much time together just to hang around together in Shanghai. In fact, we’ve hardly done any of the touristy things here, despite having lived here for over 7 months now!

So Chris decided a trip to the Aquarium was in order. I was interested too, to see what a China-made aquarium would look like. Truth be told, we didn’t have high hopes.. we’d anticipated dodgy aquariums, dirty and murky. Kind of like many foreigners’ views of China – it’s dirty and just not as good as other countries. Yet, often it’s wrong, because in fact China always does things bigger, better, and on a much grander scale.

It was the case with their Aquarium. We were fully impressed with the gorgeous, colorful and clean exhibits and the high-techness of it all. And whilst it didn’t have certain animals (mainly the large ones like polar bears, etc), the ones they had were awesome.. and many of the exhibits were flat-out amazing. The BEST one was shark eggs, laid out in various stages of growth before the shark hatches. The egg shells are translucent so we could see the un-hatched sharks wriggling inside in their various stages of growth. It was INCREDIBLE!!!!

The information (in English and Chinese) was also really well written, and very informative. I loved it. We met many lovely, polite people also visiting the aquarium and had a brilliant time. It makes for an awesome date 🙂

Super colourful aquariums

Very bizzare looking bright-yellow fish

One friggin’ crazy-eyed eel

Where you can touch the sharks. Tres cool!

A wee exhibit with pufferfish, and, um, Chris the pufferfish

One lonesome fishy

Sea urchin. OUCH!

A whole ton of fish

One really creepy looking salamandar at the bottom of the tank

Cute duck!

So tame and adorable 🙂

Baby shark

Some sorta sucker fish, its moving mouth was hilarious

And dowwwwwn we go..

…into the longest underwater aquarium tunnel in the world!

Fish swimming overhead in the tunnel

GRRRR

Man that razor/sword thing has gotta be annoying, and it must get in the way something shocking!

Teeming with fish

Gorgeous colours

Chinese Water Dragon

Wee penguins. Awwwww!

One huge crab. Bet it would taste good *rubs belly*

Beautiful rays

A blue spotted ray

Like a mini Maldives, *lol*

Love this pic!

They shucked oysters in front of us, and gave us the pearls. COOL!

Zonked out at Coffee Bean afterwards