| Cruise to Alaska on the Crystal Harmony whoo-hoo! |
| I'm going to share my experience on my 12-day cruise to Alaska on board the Crystal Harmony cruise ship. The trip was courtesy of my younger brother, David, who is the Casino Supervisor on board the ship. Thanks to him (and it's the only reason I was able to take this trip) I was able to cruise for free. But as you'll learn, it's "free" with asterisks, lol. First off, for some reason, the cruise line doesn't consider a sister to be immediate family. Our mom, yes, me, no. So that meant if I didn't want to pay $100/day for my stateroom, I'd have to share my brother's. No big deal because I was making him sleep on the floor, anyway. No skin off my back, lol. The cruising experience for the crew is vastly different from that of the passengers, as I'm sure comes as no surprise. Normally, crew members are placed two to a room in bunk beds in which the person on top can't sit up without hitting his head on the ceiling. The only way for two people to be in the room at the same time is for one to be sitting on the bed. It's that cramped. If you stood in the middle of the elongated room (a literal shoebox), you could touch both walls. I'm not kidding. It's frighteningly claustrophobic and there isn't a porthole to relieve the hysteria. Another fun bonus is the bathroom, which, needless to say, is tinier than the rest of the room. By some strange law of the ship's layout, the bathrooms are shaped like a box with a triangle attached to one side (I'm sure there's a geometrical name for it, but damned if I know it). The triangle is the shower. Literally, you could sit on the toilet and take a shower. If you leaned against one wall of the shower and reached out, your palm would come flat on the other side of the triangle. You become very, very intimate with the shower curtain. Dropping the soap means you risk impaling yourself on the doorknob. And if you make a mistake and don't ensure a tight seal with the curtain and the wall, well, you pretty much spray the bathroom mirror and everything else inside the bathroom. I've heard that during rough weather, you can actually fall out of the shower and into your room. But that's the normal crew room. I was slightly luckier in that my brother is a supervisor, and so he gets a single room. It's larger -- two people can maneuver around each other with no problem -- and there's a porthole to ensure yourself that you are not at the bottom of the sea, despite what your stomach may be telling you. There was room enough for David to sleep comfortably on the floor, and for my luggage to provide entertaining obstacles everywhere else. The cruise line my brother works on is called Crystal. It only has four ships and they cater to an upscale clientele. Most of the ships are small. The Harmony, which I was on, carries only 800 passengers. Lines like Carnival or Royal Caribbean carry upwards of a couple thousand. Crystal cruises are intimate. Crew members are meant to cater to these people. And these people expect it. They're rich. For the cruise I was on, the worst inside stateroom cost $4900 per person. The penthouse suites went for $21,000. *Per person*. Crystal is also unique in that it provides world cruises that, you guessed it, cruise the world. My brother is the first Ceaser's Palace employee to have seen the world this way. 100-day cruises can cost $199,000 per person. Crazy, huh? To give you another idea of the crowd I was traveling with, the average age of the passengers was 65. This made my trip a bit fun for me because when I took the shuttle from San Francisco airport to the port of S.F., I was dressed in baggy white bondage pants and you can imagine how many looks I got. I loved it. I met my brother and we played around Pier 39 some before going onboard for the 4 o'clock sail away. As you'll discover, being a family member of a crew member has its unique advantages. I was able to do everything the crew can, and everything the passengers can. I was like the maverick guest, forbidden from doing nothing. An example was the sail away. If you saw Titanic, you'll remember that Leonardo di Caprio did his "I'm the king of the world" thing at the very front of the ship. Well, it turns out that that particular spot is forbidden to guests. But not, as I'm sure you've guessed, from the crew. The cruise line apparently doesn't care if a crew member topples overboard. Because, really, that's very possible. The picture below is me standing where Leonardo stood and there's nothing behind me but ocean. The poor passengers had to satisfy themselves with standing three decks up and forty feet back, protected, but hampered. |
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| No, I am not that abundant. It's very windy and my jacket was billowing. Honestly. Oh, and I'm very proud of my Linkin Park beanie. My brother hated it. I wore it everywhere. |
| San Francisco was windy and cold (big surprise) so I wasn't able to stay on deck for the sail under the bridge. I managed to last until Alcatraz and as you can see by the pic, it was so windy I was afraid I'd lose my precious beanie. |
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| I met my brother's friends (or at least, the people he's forced to work with) and they were all pretty nice people, some from Las Vegas, some from places like Missouri, where they have riverboat gambling. I learned that the casino was where I would find most of the English speakers on board the ship. Cruise lines are registered out of places like the Bahamas and Norway because they rely on what I consider to be slave labor. Some of these people make $200 a month. For those crewmembers from places like the Phillippines and certain Eastern block countries, that's great. And by all appearances, they're happy to have their jobs. Every crewmember who helped me or waited on me was unbelievably polite and pleasant. And very good at their jobs. Here's a secret: if you take a cruise and the passengers need to abandon ship, don't go running for a ship's officer. They don't know beans about how the lifeboats work. According to my brother and his friends, during staff lifeboat drills, it's the Phillippino crew members who actually know how to do everything. That's who *they* would try to find during an emergency. Just a tip. Anyway, with only 30 American crewmembers on board, and since I was living in the crew quarters, I was introduced to a variety of interesting English dialects. I've never heard English spoken so many ways before. In fact, the ship actually makes all its crewmembers take an English test. And it's not what you think: the test is designed to see how well you understand English when spoken by a Norweigan, or by a German, etc. One of the American casino dealers actually failed it. After the sail away from S.F., we had a full day at sea. The crewmembers generally hate days at sea. It means they have to work all day long. In the casino, that means split shifts from 2 pm to 6pm, then 8pm to 2am. They despise it. Everytime I saw one of them, they asked me if I was sick of the ship yet and ready to hit land. Well, it being my first day at sea, my answer was in the negative. This was what I'd been looking for, after all -- time to relax and write. Dutifully, full of high hopes for the plethora of stories I planned to whip out, I carried my laptop up to the Lido deck, which opened onto the back of the ship and which my brother assured me would be the best place to write. Plenty of sun, he said, you can see the water, and no wind. Well, he was absolutely right. Delighted, I set myself up at a table, put on my sunglasses and cracked open my laptop. A nice young cocktail server offered me a drink and I ordered a Pina Colada. Two hours later, I woke up to find myself drooling on the keyboard and a sunburn in the shape of a half circle burning into my right arm. One thing I was not prepared for about cruising: nothing is quite as condusive to sleeping as the gentle rocking of a ship. I fell asleep everywhere. I moved inside, thinking the sun was partially to blame. I took a seat in the Vista lounge during Mozart Tea in which violinists play the composer's works and servers offer you tea and a variety of sandwiches and fingerfoods. I woke up when a server informed me the ship was having a lifeboat drill. Argh. I tried other places. Places with noise -- in the Galaxy lounge a speaker was giving a lecture on the natives of Alaska. No luck there. Talk about frustrating. And a little worrying. This trip was supposed to be about writing. So I gave up for the time being and prepared myself for my first dinner on board. I work in a very nice restaurant in Las Vegas, so admittedly, my standards when it comes to fine dining are pretty high. Unfortunately, the ship's chefs could meet them only occasionally. The menus were fabulous: on the Bon Voyage dinner I had cold cream of fresh strawberry soup, caprese salad, grilled Black Angus filet with Bearnaise, and white chocolate truffle cake. And yes, before you ask, I had four courses every time I ate. What a pig. But like I said, some dishes were misses that pained me in how close they were to being really, really good. But that's okay. It was costing me $6.50 a meal to eat in the dining room, so who was I to complain? The next day, we sailed into Ketchikan, which according to the signage, is Alaska's first city. I wouldn't exactly call it a city. People live there, and they live in squalor. Sorry, that's just how I saw it. I'm sure there are probably neighborhoods that are similar to ones I'm used to, but my brother and I walked quite a bit and we didn't see any. The allure of Ketchikan, apparently, is the fresh air, the abundance of trees, and the opportunity to milk the tourists dry. Unless you're a fisherman, I don't see how else you make a living there besides offering cheap T-shirts with a moose head on them at 5 for $20. |
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| More crazy pants. My brother winced everytime I pulled another pair out of my suitcase. |
| There's not much to do in Ketchikan. My brother and I followed the Ketchikan Creek, which runs up the middle of the town. A lot of the buildlings are built on stilts overlooking the creek. The creek was actually pretty cool because we could see schools of spawning salmon in the water. They're huge! Big black fish that are just under the surface and occasionally jump out of the water. It was really something to see the fish in their natural habitat, actually doing what you see them do on T.V., lol. My brother and I found a map and walked to the Salmon Hatchery and Eagle Habitat. That was great. First of all because we got 50% off the entrance fee since we were crewmembers (like I'm going to tell them otherwise), and secondly because the tour was very insightful. You walk into the building and bam! there are two bald eagles just sitting there. Well, the smaller male was sitting there and the larger female was tearing a rat to shreds, but you get the idea. I never expected to see something so endangered just sitting there. Later during my trip, I'd see bald eagles everywhere. Anytime you thought you saw a golf ball in the trees, chances are it was a bald eagle. After the eagles, we went through the hatchery and saw where all the salmon are spawned and raised in tanks. It turns out that about 80% of the salmon that swim to Ketchikan are ones that the hatchery released. The other 20% are stray salmon with no sense of direction. |
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| This shows the stages of the salmon before they're released. It looked pretty neat at the time. Here, it just looks like different types of bait. |
| We saw where the salmon are diverted from the creek and steered back into the hatchery. There was a holding tank with about fifteen salmon in it. Again, they were huge. Maybe I'm just clueless about salmon, but whenever I'd seen them in the supermarket, they looked about two feet long at the most. Here, they can be upwards of 50 lbs! There's a picture in the hatchery gift shop showing a woman holding a fish she caught that weighed 57 lbs. Hella lot of salmon. In the gift shop, there was a tank holding salmon. That was actually slightly scary. If I found myself in a tank with those salmon, I'd probably end up panicking and drowning myself. In the tank were mostly male salmon, and one female (the red one). I think I remember our guide saying that they were a combination of King and Coho salmon. But I could be mistaken. I was agog at the fish. |
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| Which is scarier? |
| In the gift shop, I contributed to the cause by buying some keychains of plastic bears that 'poo' when you squeeze them. I love those! |
| So that was basically Ketchikan. Lot of trees, terrible housing, and cool salmon. Back on board, it was time for dinner. Even though I complain about the food, I have to rub it in that I ate the stuff, you know? So that night I had a hearts of palm salad with dungness crab and sweet corn; chilled cream of banana soup with rum; macadamia nut and honey crusted lamb (which was to die for); and cherries jubiliee. Later that evening, the ship had a launch party which, according to my brother, has happened only once before since the ship's christening in May. Forced to succumb to the hoopla, I attended and had to endure an hour of a ventriloquist with dummies of varying racial stereotypes. Good god. Let's hope the ship doesn't have another launch party until next spring. The next day was Juneau, Alaska's capital, and David had big plans for this trip. Originally, we'd planned on taking a float plane to a glacier and then ride dog sleds. I vetoed this idea when I found out the sleds were on wheels. What the hell? Since when did that happen? It seemed too compromised for me, so I said no. Instead, we ended up getting lucky. As happened at the hatchery in Ketchikan, crewmembers get discounts on certain shore excursions. If they offer to escort a tour, they get to go for free, but that entails babysitting a lot of elderly people and really, what fun is there in that? But for regular tours, crewmembers get a 50% discount. We took advantage of that for the X-trek. As you can imagine, anything with an X in front of it is going to be extreme. This one was. The trip is normally over $500, but we got it for $250 each. Definitely worth it. Most of my pics are from this excursion. We took a van to Juneau's airport, where we geared up for the adventure. Boots, bibs, jackets, gloves, other gear I don't know what to call, helmets and backpacks. By the time we were fully dressed, I was sweating most indelicately. We were given instructions on how to behave: don't take off your gloves because the ice can slice your hand open; don't take off your helmet because you could fall down a ravine and crack your head open; sign this because we're not responsible if you fall to your death, etc. The more warnings and disclaimers we received, the more excited I got. Then five of us climbed into a helicopter. It was my first ride and I loved it. Wow. It made me want to get my flying license. I've always been a sucker for the moment an airplane's wheels lift off from the runway and this was that sensation a hundred times magnified. I kept hoping the pilot would do a barrel roll or some other crazy stunt that would involve me being pressed against the glass of the chopper, on the verge of falling out of it. It was fantastic. We flew over some lake, and headed towards a giant glacier (I guess they're all gigantic, aren't they?) that looked like nothing more than snow spilling like a river between the mountains. That was our destination and it had a name, but I'm afraid I can't remember it. |
| The next day we sailed into Skagway. In Skagway, as in Ketchikan, we were faced with the conundum of what to do once we'd bought all the "authentic Alaskan gemstone" bracelets we could carry. We went hiking, which I'm normally a big fan of. However, my brother has been working this cruise since June. He's been to Skagway more often than any person should. When he suggested hiking, he no longer considered hiking to be the sort of activity in which you gaze around in wonder at your surroundings and pause to take a picture or two. He's been there, done that. It was like we were competing against another team that I wasn't aware of. I finally gave up trying to keep up because it was making me cranky and miserable and I just sauntered along at my own pace. Eventually, thanks to my unforgivably slow pace, we got to the destination he'd been hell-bent on getting to. Clever him, he'd brought along hotdogs and buns for lunch. Too bad no one brought any matches. We actually resorted to trying to start a fire with sticks. I gave it a good try. Hey, I've read Army survival books and those worst case scenario books. Given a couple of hours, I'm sure I could have managed a spark. But alas, time was short and the hotdogs were spoiling, so we gave up. Very disappointing. We walked on, skirting a lake and I managed to stall for pictures. We also walked through these extremely dense forests which had to be seen to be believed. It was too dark within the trees to take pictures, unfortunately, but I won't ever forget how creepy that was. |
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| One of the views outside the helicopter. Gorgeous, isn't it? |
| We flew around, taking in the sites. We saw a group of mountain climbers at their base camp and they looked like ants. Incredible. Then we swung over this big field of jagged ice. It looked like the microscopic pictures you see of skin or hair, all scaly. The guide gave us some technical explanation for why the ice jutted up like that but frankly, it involved a lot of changing pressure and shifting of ice and whatnot and that's as much as I got out of it. Let's just say it was cool. Oh, and periodically, like puddles of rainwater on a sidewalk, we'd see these vibrant pools of blue water. When I say vibrant, I mean *vibrant*. Picture the most perfect, pure blue imaginable. When everyone saw those, we all let out a collective, "ooh!". Our goal was a little yellow tent in the middle of this white wilderness. The helicopter set us down on ice. I can't even begin to explain this ice. It was like glass. But like crystal, too. When you broke it, it shattered into cubes and other amazing shapes. It was so bright you could see the sun through it. Beneath the ice, was water. Let me tell you: it was a strange sensation stepping onto what looked like a sheet of glass over running water. It was as solid as concrete. We were all hesitant where we stepped initially, because you could see water beneath the ice everywhere. But we soon learned that the ice here was unbreakable, and that the water had to burrow in thin streams to make it across the glacier. I'm not explaining this well, but take it from me, it was mind-boggling. Our guide, Mike, gave us all crampons (spikes which attached to our boots) as well as ice axes and picks. I love rock climbing, and once fancied myself taking a trip to Nepal to try a trek there. So getting all of this gear was like heaven to me. It, uh, explains why I have so many pictures of this adventure, lol. |
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| First stepping onto the glacier. Whee! |
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| I took this right before we headed back. This is a much larger shot, so it's difficult to see details here. That yellow dot is the tent at camp. There are some red figures in the foreground. That's another team. We, however, are way above them. This shot was taken after we'd been climbing for a good three hours. All of the white you see is glacier. This gives you some perspective, eh? |
| I can't convey with words how utterly amazing this was. The water was crystal clear. It was so blue and clear that I couldn't stop myself: I stuck my face into the water (because there's no other way to drink from a running stream) and drank it and it was the sweetest water I've ever tasted. We'd been given bottles of water in our backpack, but I poured mine out and refilled it with glacier water. I mean, come on, I've got the best water in the world right here! Mike showed us different climbing and descending techniques with the crampons and the pick and axes. At first, we are all awkward. I got my crampons stuck togetether and fell down the slide of a side of ice. Later, I stepped on snow (for future reference when on a glacier, don't step on snow, only ice) and fell down a crevice up to my waist. I should have taken a picture of the bruises on my shins and knees afterwards. I looked like I'd been attacked by both a shark and a midget with a hammer. As the day continued, and our confidence grew, we were leaping from ice chunk to ice chunk like seasoned mountain goats. I could go on and on (and I'm doing a pretty good job of it, eh?), but I'll let pictures tell the tale. |
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| Yes, that would be me, famous explorer and conquerer of large glaciers. Look at all of my cool gear! hehe! |
| Here I am utilizing the toe-in technique. Look at the jagged ice. Isn't that crazy how it juts up like scales like that? Even if you wanted to walk on flat ground, you couldn't. |
| I like this picture. It looks like something out of the National Geographic. And doesn't it look like we're climbing piles of salt? |
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| Whoo-hoo! Tricia's climbing! Check out my ice axes. |
| Now I'm climbing down. And no, I had no idea that someone was taking my picure. Why do you ask? |
| Look at that water. It looks kind of turquoise here, but it was a bright, perfect blue. |
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| This is my favorite picture. Its the background on my laptop. Look at that water. Okay. I'll stop now. |
| Yawn. Another day, another glacier... Next. |
| Since there were only five of us in the group and we were all in pretty decent shape, our guide wanted to see how high we could climb. We ended up scaling the "impenetrable wall" and setting a new elevation record (assuming Mike wasn't just shining us on, which is entirely possible). We stopped at one of the pools to have a snack, though how they expected us to eat the bagel and salmon cream cheese they packed for us without utensils and with fingers that had the flexibility of frozen sausage, is beyond me. So basically we just stood there and breathed deeply of our accomplishment. It was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, we *had* come here on a ship and said ship was due to sail out at nine that night. So with much regret, we headed back. We looked like glacier pros, jumping and running fearlessly down the ice. And when we had to give up our crampons and walk in boots again, we all nearly fell on our asses. If you ever get the chance to go to any place with a glacier, please take a trip like this. It's worth every penny. |
| Needless to say, we were exhausted when we got back on board the ship. I took the hottest shower imaginable, secure in the knowledge that the ship would never run out of hot water. Yum. That night, my brother and I ate in one of the ship's two restaurants. We ate in Kyoto, which is obviously the Japanese restaurant. I was looking for bear on the menu, since my hunger demanded it, but I settled with salmon and tuna sashimi for an appetizer and the obon tray, which featured lobster, filet, prawns and tempura. Good enough. I slept like a babe that night, which actually wasn't exclusive to that one night. Sleeping on a ship, in a room that's pretty much a tomb when the porthole lid is down, is like falling into Rip Van Winkle land. Every morning (okay, afternoon) when I woke up, I felt like I'd been asleep for three days. It's a good thing I don't work on that ship because I'd sleep through every shift. For someone who views sleep as a necessary evil, submitted to under duress (or the threat of work in four hours), I definitely caught up on some much needed rest. |
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| This is right before my brother said, "Hurry up, you slacker." |
| For some reason, coming back took a lot longer than going in. I think we got lost, but neither my brother nor his friends would admit to it, insisting that we merely needed to "take the right shortcut". Whatever. By the time we got back to town, my toes had been smashed into the front of my hiking boots, and I was feeling every single muscle that I'd used that day and the previous. Ouchie. That night, I think we ate at the Italian restaurant, Prego. I shoved so many carbohydrates into my mouth that it's amazing Dr. Atkins didn't rise from the grave to howl at me. I had beef carpaccio, creamed mushroom soup in an oregano bread bowl, capellini with prawns, and the sampler dessert plate, which included pana cotta, tiramisu, and a flourless chocolate cake. I almost threw up. The next day was Sitka, which until that morning, promised to be, in my brother's words, "The lamest stop we make". *However*, fate was on our side because the fishing charter that we'd been trying to get on and which looked doubtful, suddenly was good to go. This was fun, because it was three to a boat, which you drove yourself. My brother drove for a while, then I did, and for some reason when *I* drove, all the water spilled inside over the driver's seat. We were excited to catch fish. Specifically, to catch salmon or halibut. What we ended up with was the same rock fish I used to catch off the Pismo pier in California. Bummer. But at least we caught something and I love fishing enough that it didn't matter too much that we only caught ugly, so-so fish. We brought our fish to a little houseboat and there, the guides cooked them up for us. |
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| One of my brother's friends actually caught a small halibut and some type of cod. Curiously enough, when the guides cooked up our fish, we were served only rock fish. Hmm. |
| As to be expected, we were all fishy and felt utterly disgusting, so we raced back to the ship to shower. This was a short day on land, anyway. Some ports are only four hours long. Fortunately for me, most of my ports had been long ones. That night in the dining room was the Royal Feast. Oooh. I should mention at this point that in packing for this cruise, my brother had explained that I would need to bring some formal wear. There'll be formal nights and informal nights, he'd said. I took that to mean that on formal nights, you dressed, well, formally. And on informal nights you wore your casual clothes. Wrong. Informal meant just slightly less dressy than formal. For someone who'd packed ten pairs of bondage pants, this presented a slight problem. I ended up wearing the same damn black dress seven nights in a row. I hope I never see that dress again. I was wearing it to the Royal Feast and it was the one night I didn't feel self-conscious about my outfit. I felt very sorry for the servers on this night. How humiliating. They had to wear the goofiest costumes. At least the food was good that night. I had the "royal treasure with caviar pearls", which was a chive pancake topped with caviar and creme fraiche. Yum. I wanted to ask for two more, but thought it might be a bit gauche. Then I had chestnut soup with bacon and dover sole a la orange for my entree, which was great, but was strangely topped with salmon eggs. Salmon eggs make me want to vomit. They taste just like I imagine salmon egg bait tastes like. Ugh. I had a pithivier for dessert, which took the badness away. The next morning the ship was buzzing with excitement. I have no idea why. Still don't. We were cruising Glacier Bay, which in my mind I had pictured to be lined with gleaming white glaciers. It was lined with glaciers alright. Brown, dirty ones. Only the big one that we paused in front of to take pictures was white. Everyone stood on deck, freezing, waiting for parts of the glacier to fall off into the ocean. I kept insisting that someone blow the horn to speed things along. No one listened. I returned to my room and slept through the rest of the fabulous Glacier Bay. It had been awhile since we'd had a sea day, so I was determined to get some writing done. I'd been doing a pretty pathetic job of pecking away at the keyboard while my brother was working. I had four stories all in the exact same stage of incompleteness. It was aggravating. That day at sea didn't improve matters much. I managed to finish up only one story and post it via the ship's internet. Apparently, the connection is a satellite one, so it's damned expensive. You're charged by the amount of data transfer you do so it ends up being a sort of video game where you're clicking the 'stop' button as soon as a page starts downloading. What I would have given for a true internet connection. I was dying for some fics. But I was excited because the next day was Vancouver and while the city didn't hold any particular interest for me, my brother had promised that we could go see "Pirates of the Caribbean". It turns out that my scoffing of Vancouver's charms was premature. The city is gorgeous. It reminds me of San Francisco, one of my favorite cities, but without the annoying hills. And there are trees. And water. And it was sunny, which my brother told me is rare, but I refuse to believe him. We went down to Stanley Park and he rented roller blades and me, being more prudent (and unsure of how many hills we'd be navigating) chose a mountain bike. Wow, that was fun. We rode all around the perimeter of the park -- several miles -- taking us along the water line and through trees, and by the numerous water parks for children. In that sense, it reminded me of Manhattan Beach, where I'd lived before poverty forced me out. So many people were out and about, sunning themselves and biking and blading. I kept insisting that everyone in Vancouver was so healthy. My brother pointed out that everyone we'd seen out that day had been pale as ghosts because they never see the sun. Nitpicky. We took a cab to a theater on Granville. I window shopped, wanting to buy these great bondage pants with leopard bum flaps. They didn't have my size, which is just as well because the price was outrageous, even if it *was* Canadian dollars. Then we saw "Pirates". Oh, matey. Orlando is beautiful. And Johnny Depp was better than I'd expected. The girl annoyed me, but that's par for the course. I left the theater (which had to have been built in the 60's) thinking up all the possiblities. We caught a cab to the Gaslight district and ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory. That's when I sealed my love for Vancouver. You see, in Las Vegas, there is no subculture. There's no culture at all. It's all flash and hookers and very, very superficial. I'm the only one I've ever seen around town wearing my type of clothes. It's sad and disappointing. But here in this particular part of Vancouver, I saw people walking down the street wearing the type of clothes that I only get to see in catalogs or on Ebay. Too bad it's Canada. Not that Canada is bad, mind you, it's just the whole "moving to another country" bit that's annoying. We'll see. We got back to the ship twenty minutes before the midnight sail. Yet again, another reason to love Vancouver. The sail away reminded me of a small-scale Hong Kong harbor. I'm a sucker for lights (obviously, since I live in Vegas) and seeing them reflected off of the waters is just mesmerizing. I stayed up long enough to watch us sail under some big bridge whose name I never heard. It was great. The next day was Victoria, British Columbia. But it was a "bad" port because the sail away was at 1 pm, which meant that you'd have to leave the ship and do your sightseeing in time to be back by noon. I slept through it. I spent the next two days at sea writing and absorbing my trip. The closer we got to San Francisco, the more I dreaded going back to work, which is typical, I know. But I felt it and I still feel it now. But at least I had this opportunity and I know it was a rare one. My mother and my brother's ex-girlfriend take this same cruise in August. They're very excited, especially seeing the pictures I've brought back. I know they'll have a great time. If you get the chance to take a cruise to Alaska, I hope you do. ?--Tricia, July 21, 2003 |
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| A boy and his rock fish. Isn't my brother cute? |
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