WestCoast 6 : House of Douse
We drove on to San Diego over regular highways and found that there was absolutely no hotelroom available to us there! Quite surprising as we read that San Diego has over 45.000 hotelrooms in the city. We ended up after driving for a couple of hours at La Jolla - a very atmospheric suburb aligned beautifully next to the sea. The waters are protected so you can sea dolphins and seals swimming in front of the shore!
San Diego has a famous ‘Gas-Lamp District’, which is completely packed with beautiful people at night who are enjoying dinner/drinks outside. The weather is great here.
We went to Sea World - and I actually thought it would be an sea life-experience with an educational flavour to it. Forget it. Sea World is a theme park and it happens to be - quite a coincidence - that there are some animals of the sea nearby. So as in any theme park you trip over the eating options, you have screaming and spoiled kids everywhere, there are waiting lines and best of all… you have shows! In such a show, the ‘host’ makes you sing all kinds of songs and informs everyone extensively that the first couple of rows will get wet (cosily named the ’soak-zone’). Then you will see dolphins for a couple of minutes who will do jumps and do a special movement in which they soak the people in the front by splashing with their tail back and forth near the surface of the water. Then you can leave again.
One show made up for the whole entrance fee, though. Shamu - a giant killer whale but that probably doesn’t so nice for the kids so they call him Shamu - performs a show at night together with 3 smaller killer whales. It’s called House of Douse and it is amazing to see such magnificent creatures from up close. They are very impressive and beautiful at the same time. They command respect from their onlookers. Surely, they swim all around in their pool while the host is doing a dance in front of it and everybody has to mimic her. It strikes me as rather bizarre to do the cha-cha-cha with a complete audience while there is a rare and threatened killer whale just 10 meters away…
Afterwards one of the hosts stood on Shamu and made a complete tour around the pool carrying an American flag. We watched fireworks for a couple of minutes ‘in honour of our heroes’.
Animals come second place here.