text: On one hand, the Sea Life Aquarium is an aquarium. If you've seen one, you've seen this one. On the other hand, it's in a mall. That's right. An aquarium in a mall. I mean Concord Mills isn't your typical mall, so what did you expect? The attraction (they say that a lot) is run by a group that has a few of these - this is apparently the sixth in the US, and there are another couple of dozen scattered around Europe. So you may have seen them elsewhere, but this is the first in the area. The closest in the US is halfway across the country, so there's that.\n\nFirst, you buy your ticket. It's not cheap (though you can save a few bucks if you buy online, or if you buy an annual pass if you want to go a lot). Expect to spend a good percentage of $100 if you have a family of four - and well more than that if you hit up the souvenir shop on the way out.\n\nOn the way in, it's not unlike a Disney attraction - you get a little countdown timer, and cute animation and everything. Only the images aren't centered properly, so the porthole of your sub isn't exactly where it should be. Ignore that and pretend the room is moving, so you actually feel like you're in a submarine, so that when the doors open, you feel like you've moved, when in reality, you've gone nowhere. A bit more money in this department would do wonders. Even a visit to a Disney property would help explain why it's needed.\n\nRegardless, you then enter a cave-like aquarium, and the fish aren't bad. They say there are thousands of them, and there could be: But there aren't a huge variety. If you've been to the NC aquariums, you've seen otters and beluga whales and all sorts of wildlife. Not here. Just a bunch of fish. Even the touch tank only has a few starfish and some hermit crabs (admittedly, they are big hermit crabs). But you can see a bunch of those at Wings when you visit Myrtle Beach, it doesn't cost you anything, you can get your favorite team painted on the shell and if it dies you can usually get a free replacement.\n\nThere are a couple of nice displays - the horseshoe crabs are perhaps the most active I've seen anywhere, and they don't look dead (like they often do). The rays swim, rather than burying themselves. The blacklight display of jellyfish is cool to look at, but you can see things like that in Spencer Gifts (at least, I assume you can - perhaps I am dating myself). And the sea horses are always fun to watch. Perhaps the best display is near the end, where you can walk through a tunnel and see the head of Poseidon attached to some tentacles in some strange mythological mash-up. Most of the sharks were hanging out here, including the only hammerhead I saw the whole time.\n\nOne word of caution: The displays say not to use flash, which is fine because it usually reflects off the tanks. In fact, all of the plexiglass reflects horribly, so you get exit signs, display signs and the lady from Waukegan in your pictures. Try and take one looking up in the glass tunnel and you'll get nothing but LED lights and no detail on the fish because the lights are above you - in other words, pictures are almost a no-go here. But it is a reasonably interesting half-hour, especially if you have little ones.\n\nThat's right, I said half-hour. While it's a big place for the mall, it's not a big aquarium. You can stay about as long as you want, and you can cut through at the end to go back around again and again, but you probably won't stay very long overall. Keep that in mind, and understand what you're paying and you'll be fine.