NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences Culture / Drinking Activity / Event Space / Museum

The Sunset, San Francisco –

Anyone yearning to geek out inside a multimillion-dollar science museum with the added bonus of booze should head to Golden Gate Park on Thursdays for NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences.

Since 2009, the Academy has stayed open late once a week to give the 21+ crowd full run of the place, with an ever-changing series of themed events and several temporary bars spread throughout the gigantic building.

Groups of friends and inebriated naturalists make a beeline for the Steinhart Aquarium, which takes up most of the basement area and includes an incredible four-story dome that emulates all the levels of a real rainforest.

Multi-tasking dudes with beers in hand nonchalantly place a free arm around their dates as they ogle the other jellyfish in the room, while established couples get frisky along the darkened blue-hued corners where some thirty-eight thousand ocean creatures reside inches behind the glass.

Back on the main ground floor, live bands or DJs set up based on the night’s theme – salsa one week, sustainable seafood the next, even a zombie theme for Halloween – as space nuts pound their cocktails before entering the Morrison Planetarium, a massive all-digital dome with a seventy-five-foot diameter projection screen.

For four hours, singles mingle among the dinosaur bones, gasp at the albino alligator, or eye that special someone at the other end of a tunnel set beneath a gigantic tank brimming with arapaima, arowana, and giant catfish.

Fitting, perhaps, that something as natural as love could bloom at NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences.