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Japan's New Beach

The name Segovia is a blend of the words “sea” and “Gaia”, which means globe. The Ocean Dome is recorded on the Guinness World Records as biggest world indoor clear liquid grounds. It opened in 1993 in Miyazaki, Japan. Unfortunately, it was shut on October, 2007. Today is completely restored as home to an enormous indoor water park with a white sandy beach, palm saplings, water slides and a swell machine capable of surf-levels. The brand new beach is immense, almost as many 6 football fields that allow everybody to lie on "their own beach". The temperature is like the Copacabana - about 30c to the air and about 28c to the water. However, the central point on this artificial beach is the retractable roof, which on sunny days is open, on fewer sunny days is shut, but then the ceiling provides you with a perfect blue sky. The Ocean Dome is only one part of the Sheraton Segovia Resort, which has; a World Convention Center for 5,000 entrants, restaurants, tennis courts, shops, golf, board rental, zoo, and many other activities. Customers pay a single price for admission and all fees are deducted from the computerized bar-coded tag dangling from each guest’s wrist. The tags are color coded according to price, which may be another modern improvement on beach culture of the past. Now, the snobs can instantly separate the have-some from the have-everything’s without squinting to read bikini labels.
All this indoor beach excitement can be costly. Entrance runs about US$50 for adults, with rides running $5-10 more. Add $10 for two hours with a boogie board, or $5 for two periods of inner tube lease.
Perhaps the rarest thing of all about this artificial environment is its location. Daring guests can step outside Ocean Dome and gaze out at... the REAL beach. From the third floor of the huge dome, beside rows of eateries like Marco Polo, Buena Vista and Key West, doorways lead outside to a veranda and a view of the age-old, unimproved beach, just the way God deliberate, mere 300 meters away. It clearly holds little appeal to most tourists.
One day, while the marimba bands churn out cheerful beach musk and the fake Hawaiian dancers tremble plastic grass skirts, I slip outside for some genuine fresh air, unfiltered and moderately possibly polluted. I make my way to the ocean and find it utterly abandoned, even on a sunny day. Maybe it’s the odd juxtaposition – so close to the simulated seaside nearby. However, the sand mid my toes feels so sensual, in ways that compressed marble never could.
Yet, even skeptical spectators are bound to experience a certain sense of awe upon coming in Ocean Dome, like the first sight of the opening scene of a new era of "Star Wars" films: even if the plot doesn’t appeal to your tastes, you have to wonder at the special effects. In some ways, it’s like seeing a giant draft board of a software program firm, which is designing the recreational effective reality microchip of the future. Some day, maybe, office workers need not even abandoned their desks. They will merely watch a destination tape and swallow a holiday tablet.
In the meantime, we will just have to struggle along with the next best thing; re-creations of the Great Outdoors, set interior sanitized domes, with sand.

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