Princess Jellyfish Palace

One of my family’s favorite manga/anime properties is Princess Jellyfish by
Akiko Higashimura. It’s about a girl who, instead of growing up to be a princess as she had hoped, grew up to be a jellyfish otaku. When she meets a real life princess, they turn out to be a beautiful cross-dressing boy. The two of them pair up to design jellyfish-inspired dresses to help nerdy girls feel like princesses. I love this story.

Before I read it, I did not know that in Asia jellyfish otaku are no more strange than model train collectors or any other nerd-level hobbyist. But I wasn’t surprised by the discovery, thanks to the Fantacy (sic) Palace of Jellyfish.

Qingdao Underwater World is the oldest public aquarium in China. It’s scattered across several themed buildings near the Number 1 Bathing Beach. It doesn’t make a great first impression, since the specimen hall is the first building you pass through. It’s a seriously old school collection of dead animals. In some places the aquarium goes a bit too far in the other direction, with mermaid shows and dancing sharks.

But parts of the aquarium are high quality educational collections. A moving sidewalk carries you underneath a giant tank in a subway-sized tunnel. And there is an entire building dedicated to jellyfish. Jellyfish are amazing, and hard to keep in an aquarium. The variety of forms and colors on display in that jellyfish aquarium far exceeded anything I could have imagined. It was a small building with limited information in English, but it was enough to inspire the kind of awe in the natural world that internet-connected folk with passports rarely get to feel these days.