Sea World

This year for our anniversary, we (well, actually I - and Jared went along with it) decided to go to San Antonio. I really wanted to check out the Sea World here. I've been to the San Diego one a couple of times and loved it. So we went this weekend. For those of you who haven't been - I highly recommend it. There are a lot of cool shows and even roller coasters. It's amazing what they can get the animals to do. Jared's personal favorite was Uncle Max. He is in the show with Clyde. Unfortunately, Clyde himself decided not to participate in the show about halfway through despite prodding. I'm not sure whether he forgot his lines or is just sick of showbiz, but he just jumped in the water and starting swimming around and completely ignored the trainers. More than likely, he was actually sick. Because after the show he did some rather gross things to the pool.

Clyde before he decided to quit for the day.

I really don't know if I'm allowed to show you the video we took of Uncle Max. But he's a pretty humongous walrus. I think Jared thinks he identifies with him because he's been complaining about being a walrus himself. The internship he is in feeds him free (and expensive) meals constantly - and if you know Jared, you know he's not very good at resisting food.

Good old Uncle Max.

I love all of it, but one of the more fun things we did was feed the seals. Here they are - you can tell why the the chunky ones are fat. They fight dirty for their fish. Sometimes they sound like you think a seal should, and then sometimes not.

Anyway, here some more random pictures of various other things we saw.

A shark ready to bite my head off

Jared with a Budweiser Clydesdale

Of course, we also saw dolphins, penguins, otters, the Shamu show (OF COURSE!), etc. but I have a tendency for my blogs to fill up entire pages, so I will leave those out. I have to include a blurb about the western show we saw though. They don't have this at the other Sea World and basically they save animals and train them to be in this show. It's was pretty cute but what Jared and I were really interested is how they trained the cats. Having these guys ourselves (and for anybody who has a cat) training them seems impossible. Though we did notice the cats did seem to have the hardest time sticking to their task in the show (they were so interested in the audience).

A good example is this cat who usually "square dances" but he was looking straight at us and was so distracted by the audience, they couldn't get him to do ANYTHING. However, they were successful with all the other cats (and skunks, pigs, dogs, and geese).

It was definitely a good time though it was so hot and humid and FULL of people. But it's the summer, so I didn't expect anything else. I'll give you an update on the rest of our weekend later.