London -- Part 1 -- The Aquarium

Because I live mostly inside my own head, reality often comes as a startling surprise.

London, for example. I thought we'd take the tube and merrily tour about, seeing all the famous places that might interest my son: Big Ben, the Zoo, the new Aquarium, and whatever else came to us in moments of spontaneous exploration. My son would stand next to the big clock tower and cringingly clap his hands over his ears as the old gong rang out 10, 11, or even 12 deafening bongs, echoing all around us, stunning us with its powerful sound waves. The zoo would be quaint and filled with rare and exotic animals from Africa and India. The Aquarium would be shiny new and bright and populated with schools of fish from the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific, and the Atlantic.

Nowhere in my musings as I poured over maps and Googled every London attraction I could think of did I include the vast crowds of tourists, many inexplicably Italian, the avalanches of primary school children on field trips from schools that apparently, never get out, the sheer exhaustion of being jostled about on sidewalks, in front of lions, next to piranhas, on bridges over the alarming murkiness of the Thames, by the hordes of people that make a big city a big city.

Big Ben we did see, massively tall and ornate. We got there, by tube, just in time for 11:00 am. "Can you hear it ringing?" I shrieked to my son, my question barely audible above the ceaseless roaring of taxi cabs; buses, single and otherwise; private automobiles; and white vans. Well, you could if you really concentrated, there it was, faintly pinging away in the background. We counted to 11, took a few photos and headed across Westminster Bridge along with the rest of the world.

The Aquarium was where they were all headed, at least those of them who were under 4 feet and outfitted in school uniforms. Boys and girls from one school in bright yellow polo shirts and navy shorts or skirts. From another school, dedicated to the theme of the Dickens Workhouse or The Little House on the Prairie, hard to say really, girls dressed in green and white gingham frocks. Some were straight shirt dresses, others truly hideous puffy A-line gowns, still others with flippy little cap sleeves and an extra flounce at the bottom. They were sort of like bridesmaid dresses, not so much in their ornamentation or attempts at glamour, but more for the fact they looked bad on practically everyone. This did not stop any of the girls or any of the other children from racing about at top speed yelling wildly at the fishes on display. After a while we got the timing down, jogging along to stay ahead of one group, but not going too fast so we could avoid the mayhem ahead. The touch tank we avoided completely. A young aquarium docent was gamely trying to tell us something about bat rays, but the excitement of the young scholars, combined with the total lack of acoustical buffering, made the whole endeavor mostly pointless. I've never really approved of this sort of cheap theatrical manhandling of the animals either and my son is in equal parts petrified and repelled at the thought, so we gave it a miss and nicely managed to outrun at least three schools at the same time.

The Aquarium building itself was very dark, black walls and ceilings and only painfully bright little lights to see by, a look so beloved of today's modern museum designer. Why it is that they believe nothing can be viewed unless framed in darkness and set off by annoying spotlights glaring out of the blackness, I'll never know. Maybe it's the responsibility of unemployed theater people who can only find jobs dramatically back lighting octopi and hermit crabs.

One pleasant byproduct of the Aquarium designers' thespian aspirations however, were the ruined temples and other bits of civilization decorating the main display tanks. A somewhat ominous statement about the relationship between human and ocean, or maybe just a way of disposing of unwanted props, we found the head and shoulders of statues of important ancient Roman men at the bottom of what looked like a sewer outlet into the Thames, a statue of Buddha calmly staring out at us from an Indian mangrove swamp, and coolest of all, giant Easter Island heads in a huge tank full of sullen sharks looking to pick a fight and other big fish who looked like they could take care of themselves if need be. Also good was the flock of red bellied piranhas in a nicely done representation of the Amazon, much bigger than I thought they would be, idly floating through a healthy thicket of river reeds, staring back at us with curiosity but no obvious malevolence.