Christmas in California - Steinhart Aquarium and California Academy of Sciences

Once again we journeyed to Sacramento, California for the winter holidays. We spent about 10 days there, and so much happened! So I will have to post it in segments, but here are the complete pictures.

We went to the museum of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park one day, which also houses the Steinhart Aquarium. 3 months later, Cecilia -still- has me tell stories about visiting the museum. In the story, she likes hearing about how we saw all the fish:

touched a starfish:


went to the playroom and put on a puppet show:



and went to the roof where there was a lot of grass growing and she pretended to climb the fence (the guard warned her not to, so she said she was just "pretending"):


At the end of the story, I have to talk about how we came down from the roof via an elevator, and then we heard the voice over the loudspeakers say the museum was closing! Then in a voice full of suspense: "But we still had to go to the bathroom and put on our jackets! So we hurried to the bathroom and we peed and wiped our butts and flushed the toilet and washed our hands. Then we went and met Grandma and Grandpa and Auntie Karen, and they had our jackets. So we hurried and put on our jackets and started to look for a door to go out. We followed Grandma, and then we heard her say 'uh oh' - the doors were locked! But it's such a big museum they have a lot of doors and they don't open all of them. And then Cecilia found an open one, and we were able to get out of the museum and go to dinner!" Yay, happy ending.

Not in the story, but of course, we saw a bunch of animals:

She stopped to play on a turtle:

In the middle of the museum, there was a big domed area for shows and activites. There, we listened to an acapella group sing Christmas music, which was great! And she even got to go up on stage with them for one song.




She also insisted on hugging a guy dressed up as a white alligator there. Twice. The real one is shown below as well (shudder).


And inside the dome, it would periodially "snow" fake snow. I guess since most Californians have no idea what it's like, they let them see what falling snow looks like... :D Given the mild winter in Boston this year, maybe Bostonians would like to see too.