Irrawaddy Dolphin

This is me with an Irrawaddy Dolphin; one of the Dolphins from the show I saw this morning. There were also two Amazon River Dolphins in the show. Both species I had never seen in captivity before, but they seemed to love their trainers and were treated very well!

I got a ticket to go "Back Stage" and hang with the dolphins and their trainers for a few hours after the show was over. They made me wear a life jacket (which I hate,) but it was well worth it!

At first, the trainer assigned to me just kinda went through the motions, but when one one of the trainers suggested we sing a song to make the Dolphins "Dance" and I began singing in Thai, it opened the doors for a lot of really cool things to happen!!

One of the trainers took particular interest in my singing and started babbling off in Thai! Normally I would have apologised and told him that I could not speak the language, but he was having such a good time; laughing and singing, that I just laughed along with him.

Eventually, the trainer pushed me into the water after a brief splash fight, (he kept signalling the dolphin to squirt me in the face, so I splashed him! ) and I got to swim around with the dolphins!
They were very fast and I really had to grip their dorsal fin to stay on! I learned a few of their signals, played "fetch," Hoisted half the dolphin out of the water by the caudal fin, and even fed it flat palmed so that it had to take my whole hand into it's mouth to gently scoop the fish off! It was yet another awesome experience I got to have, thanks to my job! Whenever work gets really stressful, I just remember stuff like this, and it all becomes bearable...