I've watched a life-size animatronic Jesus ascend to the heavens at a wax museum in Kentucky. I've been to a zoo in the UK with signage that says the reason birds sing is to “praise their maker." I've looked longingly over the fence of a Bible-themed mini golf course in Kentucky because it was closed on the day I tried to visit. And so on.

Luckily (depressingly?), there are a lot of guides online that explain how to have fun at the park. I read a bunch of them. Some contained some pretty questionable tips ("Wear a ridiculous outfit, or a graphic tee with a silly message"), but, for the most part, they all boiled down to the same thing: Keep a positive outlook and never worry about looking stupid, which sounded like something I could do. (To be safe, I also downed a couple of canned cocktails before I went.)

Which makes sense, I suppose. I have never once gone to one of these things expecting it to be fun, and have never been surprised when it wasn’t. And, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not sure that I'm a very fun person. Like, on more than one occasion, I’ve lied about having a cold so that I wouldn't have to sing at karaoke, and sometimes, at parties, I pretend I need to go to the bathroom so I can just hide out in there for a couple of minutes, staring at the wall and not having to talk to anyone.

A few months back, I wrote about my trip to Ark Encounter , a $100 million Noah's ark–themed theme park in Kentucky. It was very dull, and I said so in my write-up. After publication, I got some comments and messages from people saying that I was obviously going to find it uninteresting because I'm not a Christian, and the attraction isn't designed for my cynical non-Christian brain. That it’s not the $100 million Christian theme park that's boring. It’s me.

The tiny island the Ark sits on used to be home to a small fishing village called Ma Wan, but the village’s occupants were forcefully relocated to make way for the development of the Ark and a park that’s attached to it. The majority of the village’s structures still sit abandoned and rotting just to the west of the Ark. Some of their walls are painted with slogans protesting the evictions. According to documents that were unearthed over the course of Kwok’s bribery trial, Noah's Ark and its park were “only an excuse” to evict the villagers and make way for a luxury residential development Kwok wanted to build on the same island.

Noah’s Ark Hong Kong opened in 2009, and it has a pretty grim history. It was developed by an Evangelical Christian property developer named Thomas Kwok, a member of Asia’s third-wealthiest family who recently got through serving a five-year prison sentence for his involvement in a government bribery scheme (which was not related to the Ark).

After I arrived at the Ark, it didn't take long to realize enjoying myself was going to be difficult—several things happened to nudge my brain from "I'M GOING TO HAVE FUN IN HERE!" to "I'M GOING TO DIE IN HERE!"

When you enter the Ark, you have to pass through one of those mandatory photo ops they have at tourist traps, where they take a photo of you in front of a backdrop, then print it out and thrust it into your hand to try to guilt you into buying it. But when I walked in, there was no one manning it. I thought maybe the staff had just stepped away for a moment, so I hung out soaking up the song that was playing in there (it was sort of like that “one, two, Freddy’s coming for you” song, but about Noah). No one ever appeared. I walked through the first couple of rooms of the exhibit to see if I could see any staff or guests, but the place was completely deserted. It felt very S01 E01 of The Walking Dead. I suppose the real Noah's ark didn't have a lot of people on board, either, so it could have just been super immersive branding.

Once I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was alone in there, I started to read the signs on the exhibits, but I kept getting distracted by rustling and footsteps coming from just around the corner from where I was standing. When I went to try and find the source of the sounds, there was no one there.