Thank you for not being perky

Every time I go to the new California Academy of Science I get grumpy. I miss the old one. A lot. I think the new building is very beautiful and the living roof is awesome. I understand the amazingness of many of the features of the new building and exhibits. But I gotta say, my experience as a visitor to the museum has not been enhanced. Well, except for the food, the food is lovely and so much better than it used to be.

Lets take the old vs the new aquarium areas. Now the tropical reef and california coast exhibits are amazing and fun to look at. I am entirely unhappy with the rest of it. It’s so effing loud down there that I simply cant enjoy it. You can’t hear a thing except a steady too loud roar of voices echoing around in a tiny enclosed dark place. The flow of the downstairs is confusing and it’s easy to miss stuff. The petting zoo part is total crap. It’s ugly and boring and the clear tanks are confusing. The volunteers sanding around with their thumbs up their butts are more of a hindrance than anything else. Oh, and if you have a small kid you are screwed. Small kids can’t reach or see anything. and the dirty lip of the tank is right at my kids mouth level so he always starts licking it. GROSS! Remember the old one!? It was light and nice and interesting to look at. I loved it.

Actually, the whole place must have been designed by people with no kids. The old aquarium area was so nice and peaceful and dark and there was a carpeted step that kids could get on to see all of the exhibits. Yeah, the exhibits were plain old tanks with fish in them, one after the other. but so what? That was totally fine and made perfect sense for museum goer flow. You know what they should have done is just PUT UP MORE INFO. in plain old text. GOD! What is it with museums and their unforgivable lack of signage explaining details of what you are looking at? If some people don’t want to read about what they are looking at they can SKIP reading the signs.

It is funny that I see kids tapping the signs thinking they are touch screens. hahaha.

Oh and remember the old penguin set up? Where there were bleachers so that more than 5 people could see what was going on? yeah, GONE. again, wtf?

The weird ugly ass silver globular styling of the middle areas of the aquarium are ugly. and weird. and boring and unhelpful to kids. Kids trying to see the fish are like all pathetically trying to climb up to see and just slide right off. There is one part of it with like, a lungfish and a tiny boring fake stream about 2 inches long that doesn’t do anything or have anything in it. whhhyyyyyy? I think it occasionally squirts water making kids think it might become interesting but then it doesn’t and then if you have a small kid who cant see anything anyway it sucks even more. bad.

I think that whoever design the place wanted to shunt the littlest kids off into the toddler play area. Fine, toddlers are annoying, parents of toddlers will be the first to tell you so, but a person is a person no matter how small! The toddler play area isn’t all bad. My kid loves the boat and play food. But it also gets super loud and too crowded, it’s too small and is often full and closed. And if you’re a parent you can’t bring your coffee in… FAIL.

Also, when you enter the kids area there is this weird ass fifties looking waiting room behind a wall of glass. Just sitting there. It’s not clear what its for, I’ve never seen anyone in there and the doors leading to it are locked. What is it. It creeps me out, like it’s a window in time and I might see Don Draper walk in, sit down and have a cigarette. The only bad part of that would be that the doors are locked and I would be unable to get at him.

Kids under 4 are not allowed in the planetarium. In the old museum the planetarium was my favorite part and now, me and my kid, who maybe be only 3 but still would totally like it can’t go in. He has been in the one at Chabot and he didn’t like barf or destroy it somehow with his kid germs.

Let’s talk about the bathrooms of this building, this building that cost FIFTYFIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. The bathrooms are a fucking joke. I may need to draw you a diagram. Whoever designed it has obviously never used a public bathroom. Maybe they were born without an anus. I don’t know. First off this museum is always VERY crowded. The one restroom on the main floor has… 6 stalls. SIX! I will walk you through a visit to this bathroom.

First, wait in line for like 30 minutes. The line is trailing 20 feet out the door. There is only one door so there’s the line of people waiting and then there are people attempting to exit, it’s a mad scrum. Everyone has a like 4 kids with them somehow. There is one changing table and it’s in the one disabled accessible stall. Which is fine because there is no fucking way a person in any type of wheelchair could even get in there past the milling hoards of confused people. why are they confused? Probably because they have just washed their hands and turned towards the exit to look for something to dry their hands with. Nothing. Finally they might figure out that they have to turn back to the back of the bathroom to find one of the two fancy hand blow dryers. Wait 20 minutes til they can get over there and then fight their way back towards the exit. If you have a kid with you, which you do, they might need to step unto the clearly labeled “toddler step” in order to reach the sink. However, once there their tiny arms flail around like tiny pathetic pink tyrannosaurus arms trying to reach the faucet. They are doomed to fail. I’m 5’1″ and I can barely reach them.

The african hall is still good in that weird horrible way that giant hall of taxidermy can be.

The upstairs might be awesome but I’ve barely been up there so I’m not sure.

Also, I’m oddly disappointed in the gift shops. I might by a white alligator stuffy next time I go although now that I have written all this out i am not sure I will go again. Except that I jsut renewed my membership… So I will be going again.

The rainforest thing is neat if you can get there at a time when it is not crowded and so loud your eardrum might explode. So you walk up like 3 stories on this ramp looking at stuff and then you get shunted into an elevator that brings you down into the final crescendo of horrible loud confusing dark crowdedness that is the underwater swamp part. The clear tunnel is kind of neat but I’ll take a old not state of the art quiet museum over it anytime.

Fuck man. What is wrong with these people?!

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