Why Did We Have To Visit The Lisbon Oceanarium Right After Christmas?
And why did everyone have the very same idea? I had to mute the sound of the below video and add some pleasant music because the screaming and noise inside of it was insane. Now you would never guess how it felt inside. This article was first published on our Lisbon Travel Blog.
One of the biggest aquariums in Europe is the Oceanário de Lisboa, which opened as part of the 1998 World Expo. We visited during the holidays, and were amazed to be the only people there! Not a single screaming child, pushy mother or frazzled father; nope, just us, gloriously alone with the animals. (If you’re not picking up on the sarcasm, it’s time to readjust your irony detector.)
No, we were not alone in the Oceanarium, quite the contrary. This was a drizzly day between Christmas and New Year’s, when every child is free from school, and every unimaginative parent grasps for the same straw. Upon seeing the line, we should have turned around… but we were in the same boat. Our friend from Germany was visiting with her six-year-old child, who was already frothing with our promises of sharks and penguins. There was no backing out now. Steeling ourselves for agony, we joined the queue.
Lisbon’s aquarium is decent, and we would have enjoyed ourselves on a less-crowded day. But to be honest, it isn’t as good as the Oceanografic in Valencia or plenty of others we’ve been to. The pens seem too small for some of the animals, particularly the penguins and the otters. And besides its central tank, there’s a serious lack of things to see.
But that central tank is fantastic, and is the sole reason for the Oceanarium’s exaggerated reputation. It’s at the center of the cube-like building, and as you tour the museum, you’re basically circling the tank. With around a hundred species, including amazing creatures like the giant sunfish, manta rays and terrifying sharks, the tank is very nearly worth the cost of entry by itself.
We’re not joking, though, about how intolerable the Oceanarium was over the Christmas holidays. Please don’t do this to yourself, as the crowds simply defy belief. Even the kid we were hosting was annoyed. To get to the window of the first attraction, she had to run an agonizing gauntlet crawling between legs and squeezing past flabby hips, and her reward was a couple sickly-looking puffins. “I don’t like those parrots!” Those are puffins, kiddo. “Whatever. Can we go home now?”
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Really amazing post. I enjoyed. But next time try to put your content first on the Steemit. Users on Steemit appreciete so much when something is published here for the first time. And always put fresh content, put your post immediately after you visit something. That will bring you a lot of upvotes and followers. I follow you. Steem on. :)
I'm understanding what you're saying and yes we wish to be able to publish the content right away and that's our intend. But with normal work and visitors we fall behind and it's hard to keep up. Also I understand in terms of @curie you don't curate posts if they were published somewhere else first.
BUT you need to understand, we've invested 7 years on our Travel Blog! And we will to continue to publish our content there first. What we've learned in that time is not to put all your eggs in just one nest. Our blog comes first and always will be, because that nobody can take away from us. We've invested so much into building a community on Facebook and Instagram. But neglected driving readers to our actual website. It hurt us so much that we considered to stop travel blogging all together because it was just not worth it.
But then came Steemit!!! And we're so grateful for it - we made so many incredible connections with fellow travel bloggers and even started @travelfeed to curate travel content ourselves.
We produce unique, original content for years many Steeminans haven're read yet... it's kind of discouraging that @curie wouldn't consider them for curation because we've published those articles on our OWN travel blog first we've working so hard on. Good content is good content! But again, these are your own rules. And if our content won't be considered, it's just how it is. But we won't be neglecting our Travel Blog EVER again!
I wonder how other travel bloggers feel about it? Since we're attracting new Travellers and Digital Nomad! Would you post on Steemit first and then on your own blog? Risking that google indexes your own content on your own blog as duplicate content because you posted it first on Steemit. In returen to maybe get considered by @curie and to receive an upvote from them?
I understand. I am so sorry if I hurt your feelings. It was not my attention. I just wanted to help you. But now I see that you already know about things. If you want to publish first on your site, it is your right and your decision. We will still be happy to have you here. Enjoy your time on Steemit. :)
No feelings hurt, no worries - it's just seems odd that you curate content for it's quality but it's not good enough when I publish it first on my website. We've been creating content and working on websites for 15 years and we know that nothing will be for the eternity. It's just not worth to have the content on our website maybe flagged as duplicate content. Some other writers on our Discord feel the same way. But yeah, still happy to be here! Peace!
One more thing ... we do post articles on Steemit first when they won't fit onto our normal blog ... so we have hope we're @curie worthy once in a while :)
I also just talked to someone on the Curie Discord Channel .. Cross posting is fine ..we've posted the same article on the same day on our blog and on Steemit!!! We only talk about Christmas because it took us so long to finally get around to write about it. We're back home and have finally time to polish the posts, edit picutres and videos ... so this post wasn't 3 month old. Could you please look again?
I did not know that the one of the largest aquarium in the world was in Lisbon and I can imagine the crowds it must have been pretty annoying .)
But personally we like the Oceanocrafic in Valencia much much better, since it has outside space!
Nice
Say, that's some pretty great video footage you got. Despite the crowd too, haha. Sorry it was so crowded, that's something I personally hate dealing with anywhere is shoulder to shoulder people.
It was our own fault .. without the kid we would've turned around seeing the line to buy tickets. We had to push through .. and yes .. just seeing the video makes you think that the place was all Zen .. haha. It was not. I should post a video snippet with the original sounds. Also .. found you on Youtube ... SUBSCRIBED :)
Oh, thank you for that. :D
Have you ever swam with sharks ? Love the pictures looks like a really cool place to go maybe on a quieter day.
We missed the whale shark season when we were in the Yucatan.
Maybe next time 🦈
Such beautiful photos! And in this oceanarium there are medusas? I really like medusas :)
Great shots you took there. I couldn't stand being behind the glas and not being able to swim with them! After I tried scuba diving the first time I got totally obsessed with it :D
I did not know it was the biggest aquarium in Europe . Beautiful video and photos
As a diver i prefer seeing all those animals live and share the moment in true nature! If you like you can check my blogs, got lots of those fishes on camera live ;) But great images!
May i let you know that you used our tag wrong #steemprivate would be correct. i guess its a typo :D
Anyway, thanks for sharing this! You are of great value to our steemprivate community :)
Is it weird that this post makes me want to pretend I'm 5, watch the Little Mermaid, and pretend I live under the sea?!?