Agorophobia

G and I went to Atlanta last weekend. I had a work thing there, and G tagged along. For the fun portion of our visit, we visited the Georgia Aquarium and IKEA. Both were quite amazing.

The Georgia Aquarium opened recently, and it's the largest aquarium in the world. It was mighty impressive. It was jam-packed with people - half could have left, and it still would have been crowded. This is especially noteworthy since they limit the number of tickets they sell per day.

It was neat to see all the animals there (including otters, reef fish, jellyfish, sea lions, beluga whales, and whale sharks). The exhibits were beautiful. Our only complaint was the lack of education. There were some tanks where guests could touch animals (shrimp, anemones, horseshoe crabs), and there were staff at each exhibit to answer questions, but that was just about the extent of the education.

I would recommend the aquarium for its asthetic beauty alone, but I would also recommend going on a weekday. Maybe it would be less crowded.

So then, IKEA. We had never been to an IKEA before. Someone told G to be sure to visit when we were in Atlanta since we are renovating our house and might find some great stuff there. So I dutifully visited the website to do some research. They seemed to have some things we might be interested in, so we put it on our list for Atlanta.

IKEA is quite a phenomenon. This place is huge. It has a day care (which looked very fun), a snack bar, and a restaurant all inside. And the whole store was packed with people! Unbelievable.

We had a limited amount of time to spend at the store, and I'm kind of glad, because it is a place you could wander around for days. The organization of the store leads you on a path through all the departments. The upside is that you don't have to worry about missing anything. The downside is that it is almost impossible to take shortcuts.

The result of the path and all the people made me feel a little like cattle. And guess what happens at the end of the cattle herding? They milk you. For your money. Hee hee. I couldn't resist.

Anyway, we bought a couple of small items, and we will likely order some more stuff online. It was a fun store.

Thinking back, we probably should have skipped the IKEA visit and just ordered everything online. We probably spent more on the cab than we would have on shipping. But I guess we paid for the experience. It was worth it.