May 25, 2007. After having lunch with my aunt’s family in Loganville (which was another hearty Filipino meal of lumpiang shanghai and left-over kare-kare), we headed off to downtown Atlanta. Our first stop was the Georgia Aquarium at Pemberton Place. We parked quite a distance from the aquarium park so we had to walk through the the Centennial Olympic Park, a wide landscaped park in downtown Atlanta built for the centennial Summer Olympic Games in 1996. Pictures from the Centennial Park will be for another blog entry.

By this time my body clock hasn’t adjusted quite well. It was well past noon, the sun was shining brightly and yet I felt so tired and sleepy.

Georgia Aquarium is claimed to be the largest aquarium park in the world. Indeed, the place was quite huge and the individual aquarium exhibits were humongous. As photographed above, the largest one holds hundreds of small fishes and a whale shark. It was quite a serene spectacle.

The indoor aquarium exhibits are classified into different themes depending on the various aquatic ecosystems in the world. There are also various ponds where visitors can touch the animals. I had the chance to touch some live corals and manta rays (or whatever ‘rays’ those were), and that was quite amusing.

Unfortunately, we were on a rush to catch the last tour in CNN a few blocks away so we didn’t stay quite long to appreciate Georgia Aquarium better. After an hour of exploring the aquarium, we passed by the souvenir shops and headed for the exit.

View all the full-sized pictures here.