Maui Ocean Center

My brain is soft and woozy lately because of work (yes, the long hours are getting me all loopy), so I'm (slowly) going through some old photos that I never looked through.

I love taking pictures, but I hate editing. And since I'm short on time lately, I didn't even bother color-correcting these, I'm just posting them as they are. Some of the pictures are really saturated, some of them are very washed out, but all of them are exactly what my camera saw at the Maui Ocean Center in Wailuku, during my trip to Hawaii last year.

As it turns out, it's very difficult to take pictures through thick Plexiglass aquariums (and then all that water), so there were only a few that I could even stomach. 

So very blue. It was a very small aquarium, but had a lot of tanks and a lot of fishies.

The little fishy in the first photo. It was crazy trying to get this picture- the warping caused by the refraction of the glass, the intense blue lighting- but I really liked this fish.

Cartoony fish. This one was in a tank with natural lighting, so no more deep blues.

It's Gill from "Finding Nemo," otherwise known as a Moorish idol!

A rather evil looking fish, but his colors were so pretty. I love that so many fish have underbites, it makes them endearing to me somehow.

We called this one Pinocchio. Doesn't he look like a smiling alien? So cute, and so ridiculous. And we're back to the blue tanks.

Lovely, beautiful coral and sea plants. They have an unreal quality to them, and the fact that they move and sway is calming and ethereal.

Seahorses simultaneously fascinate and repel me. They're cute, in a sense, but also gross, in a sense. There were a lot of little horsies in this aquarium and this was the clearest photo I got of one of the suckers.

Looks like one of those sesame covered filled tteoks (떡) that I love ... that sounds delicious right now, actually.

Starfish. I love the color of many sea creatures, they can be so vibrant and unreal.

Our buddy the turtle! He was swimming around and I kept taking pictures of him, but the glass was very reflective and, for something that moves so smoothly, this guy was fast.

More turtles! Our buddy is the one swimming with his head sticking out of the water. And it was a gorgeous day in Hawaii, of course.

We nerds in visual effects call this effect "God rays," because it's that holy moment when the "Hallelujah" chorus rings out and the clouds part and you see rays of sunlight with particles dancing in them. This effect, rays shimmering in water, was beautiful. I took a video on my phone, but it doesn't do the rays justice.

More rays and some other rays, of the swimming variety. I love rays, I think they're beautiful and sleek and friendly. I got to feed some manta rays at the Monterey Bay Aquarium once, and they were so fun.

Rays and fish. I love the dappled pattern that the fish got because of the sunlight and the ripples of the water.

I miss traveling. Okay, to be honest, I miss being on vacation.

There's something so great about traveling- the memories, the new things to experience- but there's something awful about it, too. I never missed Hawaii until I had been there. Now, I miss having fresh pineapples for breakfast. I miss that sticky sweet smell that seems to linger everywhere. I miss Waikiki. I miss doing nothing, going shopping for nothing, rewarding the nothing with a fruity umbrella drink.

I certainly want to experience other places in the world, but Hawaii is temptingly located between here and Korea, and I fear that I will always want a long layover in Hawaii before making my way to Korea.

Speaking of Korea, I'm trying to figure out if (when) I will be back there. It's only been a little over a year, but I miss my family and my grandfather (maternal) is turning 90 (Korean age) this year. I'd like to visit for that, at the very least.

More updates as I have time. I'll probably try to get through my backlog of photos from my trips to Korea and Hawaii last year (now that I think of it, I think I have some good ones of my aunt's ill-tempered cat).

Back to "Green Lantern" for now.