Date Day! A Trip to the Aquarium.

So my boyfriend and I always vowed to keep going on dates, no matter how long we'd been together. Neither of us wanted to turn into the couple that just lazes around watching TV all day, every day. To us, that's a guaranteed way of making a relationship go stale. We're in a distance relationship so we try to do at least one 'date day' when we see each other. This time we decided to go to the aquarium. My boyfriend had picked up a couple of 2 for 1 vouchers when he was in Subway of all places, they were greatly appreciated as the Sea Life Centre in Birmingham is quite expensive (£19 each!). I felt that a blog post on our date day might be interesting to some, so here's what we got up to!

The weather on this particular day was extremely weird. When I left my house in the morning, right up until I got to the train station, the sun was beaming. As soon as I arrived in Birmingham it had turned dull, grey and extremely cold. It then proceeded to vary between snowing and sunshine, so odd! We had lunch before we walked to the Sea Life Centre, we opted for Starbucks as we were going to eat out for dinner too and didn't want anything too heavy. I also had perhaps the best caramel macchiato ever. 

The Sea Life Centre in Birmingham is a little bit out of the way, down a street across the road from a 'gentleman's club' actually. That being said, the area surrounding the aquarium itself is really nice. There are restaurants, coffee places, water features and a little grassy area where you could sit and eat - weather permitting of course. Just to demonstrate how strange the weather was, there's a small waterfall-esque feature adjacent to the entrance of the aquarium. It had been that cold that the water had formed icicles on the grate at the bottom of the feature yet there was no settled snow and at that time the sun was out. 

We went into the Sea Life Centre and paid then followed the 'trail' the building has laid out. There was a little rock pool area where you could touch some sea life. Today it was a starfish which felt really rough. On a previous visit to an aquarium we'd been able to touch a sea urchin (which felt like it was sticking to you - apparently it was just trying to inject us with poison, thanks little urchin!) and a crab. My boyfriend had opted out of touching the crab as he was scared so he was pretty gutted he didn't have an opportunity to redeem himself this time. Anyway, here are some of the pictures from the inside of the aquarium. The quality of these is a little off but neither of us have fancy cameras and you're not allowed to use flash so this is the best we could do...

These Barracudas looked really menacing. They had tiny pointy teeth and you just know they're looking at you, assessing if they can eat you or not. The fish in the background were huge, this picture doesn't do them justice. 

This was our attempt at taking photos with the fish in the background so it looked like we were underwater... It didn't work. There were loads of rays in this tank and I swear one was sleeping next to this bit of the glass, I love the patterns they have on their bodies. 

This giant Catfish was in the 'Amazonian' part. It was huge. I think the water in this part looks so nice and if they let you I'd definitely take a paddle in there. 

This was from the same pool as above. How pretty is that ray?! 

We managed to catch the otters at feeding time! Part of the otter enclosure is on a balcony so they have some outdoor space as well as indoor. They responded to a whistle every time they were fed something. A short blow on it meant that they'd still get more while a long blow meant that feeding time was over. At the end of feeding they each got a whole chick to eat, bones and all, which they seemed to love. 

These are poison dart frogs, which, as you can probably tell by the name, are deadly. I don't know how true it is but I once read something that said the toxins they produce are dependent on the food they eat. So, when they're kept in captivity and put on a diet that differed from their natural one they were no longer poisonous. I don't know how true this is but it's definitely interesting. There were so many of them in this tank and they're so small they were quite hard to spot. What beautiful little bundles of death. 

The next pictures are ones from inside the shark tank. I'm not sure if all Sea Life Centres are the same but the ones I've been to always have a tunnel that you can walk through and the sharks swim all around you. They're really quite peaceful to walk through when there aren't a hundred toddlers running around! The sharks they have at the Birmingham aquarium are the Bowmouth Guitar Shark, the Nurse Shark, the Black Tip Reef Shark and the Hammerhead Shark. 

Hammerhead approaching...

Another Hammerhead.

Bowmouth Guitar Shark.

I think this is one of the Black Tip Reef Sharks

This little (HUGE) creature was also in the Shark tank. It's a Giant Green Turtle. The first time we came to the Birmingham Sea Life Centre this was hiding under the footbridge in the tank so we never got chance to see it properly. This time it was swimming around for the whole time. I'd say it's almost as big in length as some of the sharks. 

I'd definitely recommend going to Birmingham Sea Life Centre. A lot of the time if you book your tickets online you can get them for a fraction of the price. Sometimes this does mean arriving at a specific time but it's definitely still worth it as those times are never really unreasonable. I really want to go to The Deep in Hull as apparently it's the best aquarium in the UK. Have any of you been? If so, let me know what it's like!

(Bonus picture of us in the Mirror Maze part, my hair was glowing under the UV light!)