Thursday, September 2, 2010

Water PARK?!

As I should have guessed beforehand going to a water park here wouldn't hold a candle to anything I've been to in the US. I went with two of my friends from last year who had lived here for a while but had never been during water park hours. The cool thing about this place is at night on the weekend they turn the beach/wave pool section into an outdoor night club. It was a pretty costly experience for the park not having a whole lot to do. The ticket only includes entry then you have to fork over extra for a locker and then a raft. If you don't get a raft you are limited to two rides in the whole park... seems like it should be included. I didn't expect the men to be wearing less in the clothing department than females. But as was the case I got to witness some oh so unsightly older Asian men in speedos and in some cases just boxer briefs. The concept of a line is difficult to grasp here. Being three stories in the air and having to push your way to get anywhere close to making it to the ride itself is a bit harrowing of an experience. The place consists of two "ride" structures that are identical to one another except one you can only use a raft and the other you use an orange mat. As I mentioned before there is a beach/wave pool which gets turned on every 20 minutes or so. There is a pretty nice but slightly dangerous children area. They have a few small slides in there that look like a yellow submarine, a pirate ship being attacked by a kraken, and a larger fort looking place. In the same area is the dangerous part. There's a section with a cargo net with floating "lilies" that you are supposed to make your way across without falling off. If any child unsupervised decides to fall they are conveniently at neck level to the cargo net. Luckily we didn't see any deaths. I had fun using it though! There was also one with the same concept but just a long rope instead. The last part was a lazy river running around the entire park. It was super congested and you had to fight your way through other people in some parts if you ever wanted to move. It was by far the best attraction in the park. It's mainly just water shooting out at you from various places in random intervals and a "spooky" cave, but the best part is the rapids. It is also super dangerous but oh so fun. For a good five minutes you get slammed against the walls and other people in rafts. Many people flip over and I could easily see a few concussions being the norm there. We went around on that part at least five times throughout the course of the day. It worried me when there was a family with toddlers and even babies going on that section. There is one warning that there is dangerous rapids ahead but doesn't really post an age limit or too much more info than that. The other cool thing about the park was the music. The first song that was playing when we got into the park was MOVE BITCH GET OUT THE WAY! well I'm not sure what the name of the song is but that's at least the chorus. Nothing more fun than a park full of kids listening to inappropriate lyrics, SUPAMAN THAT HOE! They played some Daft Punk and various other newish dance music. All and all we stayed as long as we could without getting completely bored. That and there was lightening visible and heading in our direction. In any normal water park they'd have closed everything down the first sight of lightening. It was quite the experience and I'm sure I'll get myself wrangled into doing some more random shit like this throughout the year.