Seaworld and Balboa Park

It has been an interesting couple of days.  On Wednesday we got up and went exploring around where we are staying.  We went for a wander and found a nice cafe for breakfast and had yet another pretty good coffee.  Not Astoria quality, but better than Starbucks fare.  We then went to Seaworld, which was quite good.  The shows were fantastic, but we've seen better acquariums (acquaria?) back in NZ.  After a while a fish has to be a pretty special fish otherwise it just looks like another fish.

Shamu and his fellow Orca were pretty spectacular though.  They were entertaining, elegant, immense, and capable of transporting huge quantites of water from the pool onto the spectators as the first 15 rows found out.  We were in about the 16th row and grateful for that.  The dolphin show was also amazing.  There were dolphins, pilot whales and various birds like macaws in the show.  What really made it though were the people doing acrobatics, trapeze and high diving interspersed with the dolphins. 

The final show we went to see was the sea lions show.  This was probably the highlight of the day, for all of the wrong reasons.  When you go to Seaworld, you go to see the the sea animals.  However, the funniest thing was this guy who was part of the sea lions show.  He started out as the bumbling stage crew, setting up the stage and mis-directing people to their seats.  This then progressed into him doing various impersonations of famous singers and dancers to well-known songs.  He did the mandatory Elvis, and had a bit of fun with the theme from Dirty Dancing, did a reasonable Fred Astaire "Singing in the Rain" but the highlight had to be "You're the one that I want" from Grease.  As an aid to visualisation, you need to imagine a white guy who is about 110kgs.  And a ginga.  He put on a wig that had two sides to it - a black styled up do like John Travolta, and the other side long blonde locks like Olivia Newton-John.  He then proceeded to sing and dance both parts of the duet by turning around and facing the other way.  He had the crowd in stitches.  This was all before the incredible performing sealions came out - and they were really good too.


After that, we went and saw the peguins, the beluga whales (they are white whales) and the polar bears.  They were really good too.

We came back to where we are staying and Charlie cooked dinner for us and Monique (a friend of his).  Dinner was great and we had a nice evening.  We then made the foolish mistake of being really tired and trying to sort out our finances on internet banking.  We managed to lock ourselves out and so need to call NZ to get back in.  Annoying when we're on US simcards now with plans where we can't make international calls.  We left that to sort today.

This morning we headed into San Diego intending to explore Balboa Park.  This is a very big central city park (think Central Park) with lots of really beautiful green spaces and heaps of different museums and galleries, all in lovely Spanish and hacienda-style buildings.  We went in to two art galleries - one endowed by a prominent San Diego family of the early 20th century, the other was the San Diego Museum of Art.  These were lovely; the Museum of Art had an amazing exhibition of beautiful hand-dyed Japanese silk kimonos and obis which I loved.  Among the museums we didn't go to were the San Diego Natural History Museum, the Museum of Man and the Reuben H. Fleet Science and Technology Centre.  The art galleries took up the morning, after which we grabbed sandwiches from a deli for lunch. 

We came back to the outskirts of the park to eat these and had great fun watching all the squirrels!  They didn't come very close but they were so cute.  Locals laugh at us as they think squirrels are pests!!

After this we walked around some more parts of the park admiring the beautiful buildings.  We looked down into the Japanese Friendship Garden and had delicious cups of tea at the Japanese Tea Garden.  By this stage we were pretty tired, so we came back to the condo.

I managed to put some money onto my Vodafone account and called the National Bank to sort out our travelcard issues.  It took about seven minutes to chew through my $20 top-up - luckily when the call died the lovely man from National Bank called me back.  So tonight we can go to sleep without worrying about the money.  Thank you National Bank :)

We thought it was time to explore our surroundings a little more so we went down to the private beach.  This is very beautiful and rugged - there are signs everywhere warning you not to go too close to the bluffs and to stay out of caves.  We are quite glad that the condo we are in is quite well back from the cliff!

To cap off a lovely day, we went out with Charlie to his local bar (The Brigantine) to meet some of his friends and watch some March Madness college basketball.  The bar was very loud but the company was great and the food was delicious.  Tomorrow we go to the world-famous San Diego Zoo.