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The previous entry is Ketchikan.

June 1

This was the first day that we went totally nuts with the picture-taking, running through one 1GB card and well into the second one. We had an exciting shore excursion scheduled in the morning — a helicopter landing on the Mendenhall Glacier just outside of Juneau — along with an unplanned busride back to the glacier in the late afternoon.

Friends who had gone to Alaska before had said the helicopter ride was the highlight of their trip, so we made sure to reserve our seats well before we boarded the ship. A bus took us from the docks to the Juneau International Airport (“international” because there are flights to Canada), passing through a somewhat unremarkable downtown along the way. After an orientation on what to expect on the glacier and a demonstration on how to put on glacier boots (thick rubber boots with chains for traction), we waited for the helicopters, which were more-or-less running continuous shuttles from the airport to the glacier. Each copter carried six people (seated according to size and weight) plus the pilot, and the tour sends out groups of four or five copters at a time.

We had remarkably lucky weather. This weather luck would last through the entire trip: lots of sun and almost every day without rain, until the very last day when we were on the train to Anchorage from Denali. Our guides have already said that they’re surprised by the lack of rain, as Southeast Alaska is a temperate rain forest, getting hundreds of inches of rain a year. We brought rain ponchos with us from Wal-Mart, and they were never opened. The glacier itself was overcast, but not too cold, and, from the air, we could see miles and miles. The helicopter ride itself was smooth, going far past the face of the glacier up the ravine to show various glacial features, before heading back near the wall to set down on a plain of ice off to the side of the main flow.

A glacier is defined as a body of ice that moves under its own weight, flowing forward a couple of feet a day, but also melting off at its face, so that there’s actually a net loss (for almost all glaciers during this era of global warming) of a few inches per day. Mendenhall is a river of highly compressed ice about a mile wide and many hundreds of feet thick. Huge, patterned cracks have formed in its surface from its own weight and from the chaotic process of melting and refreezing on the surface: there’s no sense of scale from the air as you fly over the ice field. Those crevasses are dozens of feet wide, and what looks like peebly rocks on the surface are boulders the size of houses. We landed on a flat plain that’s basically an eddy in this river, a bowl surrounded by stone walls.

The tour has a small camp set up which they maintain for the season. There’s a tent for the comfort of the guides and designated spots in a semi-circle for the helicopters to land. There’s a dormant copter off to the size, presumably to fly someone out in an emergency. After debarking from the copters — close to the copter is safe, far away is safe, right around the circle of the blades where the blades might tip down is not safe — we were given a little nature talk about what we’re seeing on the glacier.

There were no crevasses here, so we could walk around without any danger of falling into a deep pit. The surface was hard and sharp: if you fall on bare skin, you’ll cut yourself. There was black grit everywhere, the residue of boulders ground to dust by the moving ice long ago. The guides noted that a lot of people are surprised by how “dirty” the ice is, perhaps expecting pristine fields of white. There were also columns of liquid water that have pushed to the surface from a melted layer hundreds of feet below. If the conditions are right, there are occassional geysers, but none that day. Instead, we saw plate sized holes that burrow deep into the glacier, some of them filled with clear water. Water on the glacier is a vivid light blue, so vivid it doesn’t seem natural, as if a prankster had bombed the field with packets of the stuff that comes out of the Day-Glo factories. The color is from the very dense ice: all the air is squeezed out so that only pure blue light is scattered back.

As from the air, there was no sense of scale on the ground. The plain we were on stretches for at least half a mile from the small camp to the cliffs. The frozen waterfall in the background was actually as tall as the Empire State Building, and what looked like shrubs from where we were standing were fully grown trees. The guides said we could walk around, but there was no point in trying to walk to the edge of the plain: you can’t make it there before the helicopters get back for the return trip.

On the way back, we took a slightly different route, heading south over the low mountains before heading to the airport. We did see a small group of hikers climbing through the crevasses themselves, little ants on a vast landscape. (During dinner, we found out that one of the couples at our table did that tour later in the day.) Over one of the ridges, we saw our first glimpse of Dall Sheep working their way over the rises.

There were some eagles lounging in a roadside culvert as we took the bus back to the docks. The bus driver noted that, so unlike their majestic image, bald eagles will take a meal any way they can get it, and that there’s a landfill on the other side of those trees. It’s just buffet dining to them. Eagles, it was noted, are kind of like pigeons in some parts of Alaska. The driver also recommended taking one of the $5 buses to the Parks Service center near the face of the glacier. I believe the Lonely Planet guide states that there’s also a Juneau city bus that runs to the same place for $1.50, but didnt’ specify where to pick it up.

We had a second shore excursion scheduled for the day. Onboard, we had realized that the glacier landing excursion was pretty early in the day, and that they ship wouldn’t leave until dinnertime. From brochure, the Alaskan Salmon Bake seemed to be the most reasonable: it’s be right after the helicopter tour, and didn’t seem as silly as panning for gold or as similar to other excursions we were scheduled to take as some of the wildlife tours. The food at the bake was decent, but the salmon was actually a bit disappointing. For some reason, we found their baked beans and corn bread much better. Near the salmon bake was an abandoned gold mine — there was actually a gold panning tour not too far from the bake — near one of the innumerable springtime waterfalls in Alaska, as the mountain snowmelt seeks the sea. We got back to downtown Juneau by mid-afternoon, and saw the ticket offices for one of the buses to Mendenhall.

The Parks Service station offered a different view of the glacier. The main photography points were situated across the lake formed by the glacier melt, and there were hiking trails leading towards other vantage points. We followed one of those trails, along with dozens of other people — we realized later that it probably wasn’t one of the official trails, merely a path through the bushes that had been beaten out by adventurous photo-seekers, and that the Parks Service probably would have kept us from going down that path if we had stopped at the building first. It was a mile of walking through bushes and over rocks near the lakeshore and ended on a sandy beach formed by glacial silt. At the beach was a waterfall we saw from the Parks Service building — we were at the foot of it — and still some distance away from the glacier wall. While walking this trail, we heard a noise like thunder or like cannonfire every once in a while: the sound of unimaginable large amounts of ice cracking. Our earlier guides had told us to look towards the glacier if we heard that sound: we may see ice calving off the glacier face into the lake. But we saw nothing, and the noises we heard that afternoon were probably caused by shifts in the ice deep in the glacier.

There was still no sense of scale regarding the glacier face, until we saw a canoe tour going close to face on the lake. And that canoe was still some distance away, working its way among the icebergs that result from calving. Overhead, we saw helicopters fly by: the glacier landing tours would continue late into the evening.

There were still some hours left in Juneau before we boarded the ship, so we wandered through the tourist and residential stores in downtown. There were sightseeing rides up the mountain in a tram, as well as various coffee places (we had yet to see a Starbuck’s in Alaska). And there were eagles overhead again, wheeling slowly over the city with their straight wings. This time, I had the camera and long lens ready and spent some fifty shutterclicks trying to get a clear shot while Grace was in the souvenir store. Some passing knots of other tourists wonder what’s going on and also look up — I didn’t notice any locals, but I’m sure the sight of cameras pointed skywards is merely another sign of spring and summer to them — but my lens is bigger and I got my shots in at the dots in the sky. That’s one of the wonders of digital: I can blow the equivalent of two rolls of film to get that handful of pictures that aren’t fuzzy, and not think about it.

The next stop is Skagway.

The previous entry is Sailing the Georgia Strait.

May 31

Ketchikan is where we first glimpsed bald eagles making lazy circles above the forested shore across from our balcony. I have no pictures of those eagles: they were gone before I got my camera ready. (On NPR yesterday, I heard them mention Ketchikan and caught this story.)

This was our first port-of-call: Ketchikan is the southern-most city in Alaska that cruise ships routinely visit. There might be something more southern, but Ketchikan proclaims itself to be the Alaska’s “1st city” as well as the salmon capital of the world. We’d later be told by our tour guide that, while there are still salmon canneries in the area, tourism is now a major slice of the local economy. You can see this in the thicket of souvenir stores that line the main roads of the town and the waterfront: a bizarrely large number of jewelry stores, the usual t-shirt shops, places hawking mugs, keychains and other tchotckas. When we got off the ship, there was a line of tour buses for the various land tours that run through the area, mainly to the Tongass National Forest. We had a little bit of time before our own bus was to depart for a old salmon cannery tour, so we walked around the town.

Ketchikan is spread out on a long, thin strip next to the water, with most of the downtown streets running only a few blocks in from the shore until buildings start rising next to the mountains. There’s actually a funicular — the first time I’ve seen one or heard of the word — that runs a short ways up the side of the mountain to a cliffside restaurant and observation deck. The Lonely Planet guide suggests walking a few blocks in from the pier, away from the glut of tourist shops in downtown, to Creek Street, where the density of souvenir stores is only about 75% instead of 95%. Most of the buildings here are built on stilts above, well, a creek. Creek Street used to be the redlight district of Ketchikan, and there’s a bordello museum tucked in near a more modern Chinese restaurant. This district was apparently just outside of the original town’s jurisdiction.

The shore excursions are contracted out to local tour companies, who operate the ground transportation, supply guides and so on. Holland America provides us with an envelope full of vouchers for these tours, to be presented when departing. The cruise company recommends booking these excursions online before the trip, as some excursions may sell out. Excursions can also be book onboard, at the hotel frontdesk or through the concierge. Most of ours were done online, though we also booked a Salmon Bake in Juneau (our morning excursion ends just before lunch) and did an upgrade for the ground transportation from Seward to Anchorage, after the at-sea part of the vacation was over. It’s pretty well organized, with the shore excursion tours bringing their buses right up to the pier and dropping you off again at the same spot afterwards.

Our Ketchikan excursion was to an old cannery about half an hour out of downtown, with a stop at Saxman Village, a Tlingit settlement, on the way back. It was a peek at Alaskan history, before oil and tourism. Apparently, a lot of Chinese immigrants worked in Alaskan canneries, though there was little settlement by them afterwards: they were seasonal workers, brought in for the salmon run. Salmon are basically hand gutted and de-headed, then fed through various machines that chop them up and put them into cans. The cans are then cooked at a high enough temperature to pasturize them as well as melt the bones — there’s no processing to debone the fish. There’s no refrigeration at the canneries: the place kept running until all of a given salmon catch was processed.

Some of the machines have fanciful, non-PC names from the early 20th Century. In particular, there’s the “Iron Chink”, a fiendish contraption obviously invented by some honky to replace the efforts of poor Chinese immigrant workers. I don’t recall what stage of the salmon cannery process this represents, but, in the future, if I ever do a lot of online gaming, this will be my screen-name.

Saxman Village is known for its collection and production of totem poles — the Tlingit are the totem pole builders among Native Americans. The center of town has some sort of Tlingit theater — we didn’t arrive when they were doing a show, though we did walk through it briefly — and a totem pole workshop, where one of the artisans were sketching out a design. The half-carved totem poles reminded me of the the stone-cutting work in the early 1990s at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine near Columbia: we visited during one of the art hum classes, and various saints and their symbols were sketched out in chalk on the marble columns at the entranceways, or were emerging slowing from the stone.

Similarly, totem poles are commemorative, or represented a narrative for populations before literacy, just like cathedral iconography were originally for the peasant masses. Such-and-such pole tells the fable of the Raven and the Frog, and so on. They may represent historic events: Saxman Village actually has a pole with Abraham Lincoln on top of it. Apparently, an American frigate helped resolve a dispute between two Tlingit groups, who built a totem pole in honor of the occassion. The Tlingit didn’t want to put a frigate on the pole — something to do with living things — so instead put Lincoln up there, based on a photograph carried by the warship.

Ketchikan was actually a short port-of-call, as we left in the mid-afternoon to sail on to Juneau. The ship departures — there were several cruise ships docked that day — are probably timed so as not to clog up the channel with large vessels; we shadowed a Princess cruise ship that day and evening. In the evening, we had our first whale sighting: a humpback not too far off starboard. The Inside Passage is glacier-carved and deep, and whales and dolphins will run besides cruise ships. There was other sealife, too, including a group of seals using a convenient marker buoy to lounge on.

Here are the photos:

The next entry is Juneau.

The previous entry is Vancouver.

May 30

The passage from Vancouver to Ketchikan on the southeastern tip of Alaska takes more than 24 hours, so the first day on the ship was a day at sea. We spent the morning exploring the ship: the round-the-clock food is on the Lido Deck, the gym is on the Sports Deck, the Casino is next to the Library, you can walk around the ship on the Promenade Deck (“No jogging!”), and so on. Way up on top is the Crows Nest Lounge, overlooks the ship’s prow. It’s sort of like Ten Forward on ST:TNG, but with larger wrap-around windows and better chairs. There’s an open-air observation deck above this lounge, but, when the ship is underway, the wind can be a bit much.

This was also the only day we went to the onboard gym for a little bit of time on the elliptical machine.

One of the apparent maritime regulations for this course is to have a pilot ship guide the cruise ship through the Georgia Strait into open seas just south of the border with Alaska. The pilot ship kept with us in the morning, but I don’t recall seeing it again after we passed the Strait.

We weren’t in the middle of the ocean — there was land to starboard (mnemonic: port has four letters like left) — but the ship actually did begin to roll with the current. A complimentary brunch up in the Crow’s Nest (part of the whole fancier stateroom thing) got cut a bit short because this was high in the ship, and seemed to roll more for that reason. I was getting a bit sea sick and had to pop a Dramamine and take a nap. I actually had to take a second one a bit before dinner.

A note on cruise ship dinners: you’re assigned a table number and typically dine with other passengers. These other passengers will be with you the whole week, more or less, unless you ask to be switched. The ship also offers a more typical restaurant, where you make reservations to dine more privately, on supposedly fancier food (We splurged on Lumiere in Vancouver, and felt no need to eat there). A third option is to eat buffet-style in the Lido Deck restaurant, but this tends to be steam-tray stuff. Good stuff, but steam-tray nonetheless.

The other groups at our table were a mother and son from San Antonio (the son ducked out of dinner every other night because the Western Conference finals were on TV), a retired couple who left after the first night to be replaced by a different retired couple from Florida (whose backyard got trashed by hurricanes last year every month or so), and a younger couple from Lexington, KY (the wife, we found out a couple days later, is actually a recent med school graduate, and this was the post-Match vacation). It should be noted that the vast majority of cruise passengers are older; later, on our overland tour, Grace and I were the youngest people on the bus. I suppose it bucked the odds that half our dinner table was relatively young. The older people at our table had also been on a number of cruises before, though mainly Caribbean ones. The woman from Texas had cruised to Alaska, though not all the way up to Seward/Anchorage.

Dinner itself was the usual sequence of appetizer, entree and dessert, with a different menu each night (though, this being an Alaskan cruise, salmon in various guises was on every menu). The food was good in the fine restaurant sense and with restaurant cliches: vertically stacked food presentations, drizzled with oil infusions. Cruise ships are basically fancy mobile hotels with attached restaurants, after all. I recall a few things didn’t hit right, mainly having to do with unexpectedly canned fruit on desserts, but there was no opportunity to go hungry, in particular on fish.

The ship also designates certain dining room nights to be “casual” and “formal” in terms of dress. “Casual” means any type of clothing. “Formal” is when you have to wear a suit — it might be called “business attire” on shore — though a few people were wearing tuxedoes. There’s a third type between these two whose name I can’t remember, but I couldn’t really tell the difference between it and “casual”, probably because we weren’t on a tropical cruise and passengers didn’t wear shorts all the time. If you haven’t brought nice clothing aboard, you’d eat in the Lido restaurant on formal nights.

On Formal nights, part of the ship’s crew dines with the guests. At our table, we got the Environmental Officer. He had an accent — he’s Belgian — and I didn’t catch all of what he said, but for the most part he told stories about his times serving on cargo ships and complaining about his tiny, windowless office in the bowels of the ship. “Environmental Officer” is also apparently a new-ish post, the cruise company having created it after some mishaps elsewhere. US regulations may also be stricter than elsewhere, especially sailing in Alaska.

Note that the ship’s visible crew breakdown looks roughly like this: you have Indonesians as the waiters and stewards, Filipinos as the hotel staff, and European/Dutch officers commanding the ship. Given the nature of cruise ships, I’m not sure who’s more important to the company, the ship’s captain or the hotel director. We’d find out later that, for the hotel and restaurant staff, on our end-of-cruise survey, employees had to score at least an 8.5 on a scale of 0 through 9 to keep from being sent home. During dinner on the next-to-last night, they’d remind us to give them 9s on our evaluations.

The hotel staff was actually more attentive than any other hotel staff I’d seen. They’d actually turn out the cabin twice a day, making the bed, putting in fresh towels, restocking the fruit basket, and picking up after us in general. This happened in the late morning and during dinner. The staff-to-guest ratio must be remarkable to pull this off. Note that all the cabins are turned out and cleaned entirely at the end of the cruise: the ship arrives at 6AM and new guests come aboard at around 3PM. I’m not sure if the twice-a-day turn out service is a benefit of having the sufficiently large crew needed to do everything in the tight timeframe of embarkation days (“the crew stays on the ship, so let’s have them do something during the cruise”), or if it’s a goal onto itself. Probably a bit of both. The restaurants work similarly, doing breakfast, lunch and two dinner seatings (with 400 or 500 meals each seating, all served relatively quickly). The infrastructure needed to provide this level of service is impressive: after all, the hotel and restaurant components of the ship would be gigantic compared to any regular hotel or restaurant.

There weren’t many pictures taken and kept during this part of the trip, but here they are:

The next entry is Ketchikan.

May 28, May 29

The taxi came at 4AM. Our itinerary would get us to Vancouver at noon (PST), but, because of having to coordinate two separate frequent flier programs with their own restrictions, we’d have to route through Houston first. In a sense, over the course of the next two weeks, we’d travel from almost the very south of the country to the very north, albeit we’d see this southern point only as a sequence of glass hallways kept well cool by Texas-sized airconditioners, as opposed to the wind-swept Arctic ocean beach. Besides going to Texas, the flights were uneventful.

Passing through customs and immigration at the airport took a little longer than expected. There were many booths, all manned, and they were asking the usual cursory questions to US and Canadian citizens, but they couldn’t keep up with the planeloads of passengers being dumped into the airport at that hour. Interestingly, the officials had Kevlar vests but didn’t appear to be armed. The cruise line offered a way to bypass immigration: ship passengers would gather at various points in the airport, and the tour operators would lead them to buses that would be sealed by US immigration; they’d go to the pier directly and embark directly. This option was only available if you arrive the day the ship sails. We decided to come the day before the sailing, so as not to miss the cruise because of unexpected airline delays. And we wanted to explore Vancouver a little.

I expensively exchanged US$100 for around C$120 at the airport: not much cash, but I expected to use the credit card often — the bank will get a better exchange rate than I will. (In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to just use an ATM and pay the small surcharge to pull out cash.) Perhaps ironically, the first bit of Canadian cash was used to buy something at the airport Starbuck’s while we waited for the hotel shuttle to arrive. The shuttle took a while to weave through local streets — Vancouver’s airport isn’t serviced by highways that run through the city, which probably makes the city nicer to look at, but annoying to travel through.

We had redeemed years worth of frequent flier miles in support of the cruise. The flights to-and-from were free. The hotel rooms in Vancouver were free. We stayed at the downtown Hyatt, and there was a balcony for our room: pretty good for something paid for with vouchers. The bellhop suggested a few places to go to; we were actually interested in Vancouver’s Chinatown, as Cleveland’s is a sprinkling of restaurants and stores scattered amongst derelict factories and warehouses. It was a only fifteen minute walk away down Pender Street, and we hadn’t really eaten lunch yet. The bellhop noted, however, that this was a walk you wouldn’t want to make at night: the area gets dicey.

Between Downtown Vancouver and Chinatown is a stretch of blocks that have seen better days, though not as bad as Midtown Cleveland (though one tends to drive through Cleveland as opposed to walking). Chinatown itself isn’t particularly large, perhaps a bit bigger than Boston’s Chinatown. It’s a little surprising, since Vancouver considers itself a Pacific Rim city, with a large Asian population; perhaps the locals consider the area low rent and tend to set up shop elsewhere. The restaurants there aren’t high end, featuring lots of Formica, but the pork buns there were pretty good; the steamed rice noodles, not so much, but we were hungry. Some of the streets were crowded and overflowed with the usual Chinatown-type open-air groceries of all sorts of fish or all sorts of dried things, which was refreshing after not seeing this sort of thing for a long time. There was also something called the Sun Yat-Sen gardens there. There’s a pay section which we didn’t go into, but the free, public area was nice, a spot of green tucked between low-rise buildings off Pender Street.

We walked north from Chinatown to a district called Historical Gastown, which was apparently one of the first areas settled in Vancouver. It’s a dense area, filled with cafes, restaurants and tourist shops. (Interestingly, I saw two in-the-open drug sales as we were walking to the center of Gastown, in the seedier section just to the south. Times have changed in New York, as I don’t remember the last time I saw something this.) One of the landmarks of Gastown is a steam-powered clock. Perhaps for show, steam escapes from the top. The body of the clock is sheathed in glass, so you can see the gears turning.

Going through Gastown took us to an old railway station, now a mass-transit stop. Across the way is the Harbor Center observation deck. We didn’t go up it for pictures, because we were a little short of time and the light was bad. We did wander over to the waterside, though, and saw the cruiseship docks and the Vancouver convention center. Our ship hadn’t arrive yet — it was due in at 6AM the next morning — but the two ships departing that day were there. Amusingly, someone asked me to take a picture of him standing in front of the ship since he saw my digital SLR: he figured I’d know how to use his ancient Pentax. He perhaps was wrong on this, since I’m not sure how the exposure meter on the thing worked and I didn’t realize it was manual focus until afterwards. At least I know I didn’t have my thumb covering the lens.

Closer to the berthed ships, at the convention center, we saw a large number of high school kids in tuxes and ball gowns: it was prom night in Vancouver! They were having their pictures taken at the pier before heading in to the party.

Following that weird FoodTV junkie path, we had dinner that night at Lumiere: Rob Feenie had coincidentally appeared on Iron Chef America when we were planning our trip. My heart did sink a little when we saw that Lumiere advertised itself on the back of Vancouver buses — Babbo doesn’t do that! — but the food was very good. A little unusually, they allowed each of us to have separate tasting menus, with their “vegetarian” and “kitchen” menus having the same ridiculously large number of courses. Grace and I would eat half a plate and switch with each other. In this way, we sort of had a 18-course meal between us.

When we came back from Lumiere, the prom kids had jammed up our hotel’s lobby. Apparently, the harborside photos were just that, and the real event was happening a few floors below us in the hotel ballrooms.

Lumiere is actually a bit out of the way, and we took cabs to and from; we didn’t get around to seeing Downtown Vancouver until the next day, when we had some hours to kill in between checking out of the hotel and boarding the ship. Walking south down Burrard and west along Robson, we hit streets lined with little shops and restaurants, and crowded with people. It was kind of like a shinier, upscale version of St. Mark’s Place — there were a lot of Japanese restaurants and boutiques. I think our bellhop was right: we should have gone here instead of schlepping to Chinatown for Asian food. (There were a few closed storefronts, one of them advertising Robo-Sushi: watch your sushi order being made by a robot! I would have liked to have seen that.) Interestingly, this area of Vancouver has a Starbuck’s across the street from another Starbuck’s. Oh, the Breadgarden Cafe on Robson and Bute has free Internet access after purchase: there were fewer free hotspots than I expected, or they didn’t advertise this amenity very well. This was the closest place near the hotel that we found.

We eventually worked our way west to the park that lines that end of the penisula, but didn’t have time to do much but walk just outside before heading back to the hotel along the waterfront. Vancouver is a city we’d like to see more of, rather than incidentally, over scattered days around a bigger trip: there are bike rentals just outside Stanley Park, but that would have been days in itself.

Checking into the ship actually took longer than passing through customs at the airport. Since we were now entering US territory, we had to pass through US customs, which had booths set up on the pier. The lines were long. US Customs, however, was not the end of it, as Holland America had its own checkpoint, to make sure you fill out forms for charging incidental purchases, forms declaring that you don’t have a cold and therefore won’t be Patient Zero in a ship-wide epidemic, etc. I never thought vacations would involve so much paperwork.

This was basically our honeymoon, since we didn’t really have time to go away after the wedding — residency interviews, the Match, moving, etc., happened instead — so we splurged on our stateroom and got one with a balcony. Unexpectedly, we had a number of fringe benefits with that stateroom, such as the use of the Neptune Lounge and its vast supply of food and orange juice. This was fortunately (?) just across the hall from us. There was also concierge service for us, so we didn’t have to stand in the long lines at the regular service desks to, say, book additional shore excursions.

Before sailing, there was a mandatory lifeboat/lifevest drill. I flubbed it, tying on my vest haphazardly. The ship official who inspected my work had a disgusted look on his face as he tied the vest properly.

We sailed out of Vancouver harbor a little while later, passing by the waterside bikepaths of Stanley Park, up through the Georgia Strait, forested islands to our side.

The next entry is here.

We got home Sunday night and ran errands all Monday, dropping off film and restocking the fridge.

I think in my mind, I would type out daily blog entries on the laptop and then post them all once we got home, but I never got around to writing and the laptop’s batteries can hold only five minutes of charge before giving up; the long bus ride down from the Arctic ocean was spent reading instead of writing. In any case, we took more than 2100 pictures on the digital camera alone, of which about 1000 were worth a second look, and the business of sorting through all these would have to wait until we got home, anyway.

I actually played out my own version of Supersize Me, gaining six or so pounds over the course of this (back of the envelope: 9K Calories/kg of fat, 2.7kg weight gain over 15 days equals about a 1600 Calories/day surplus: some of this is from eating more, some from moving around less; I can claim that going on cruises is almost as bad for you as supersizing at McDonald’s!). Life will get back to normal over the next week, though we’ll be eating a lot of oatmeal, fruit and steamed vegetables over the next month.

In any case, I’ll be posting entries daily, in the sequence of when things happened on our tour. This will give me time to sort through the digital and film shots. Our first stop, Vancouver, starts here.

I was thrown in an interesting way during light pre-class randori with one of the blackbelts last evening:

While fighting for grip, tori grabs uke’s right sleeve with his right hand and steps to uke’s right side. Tori uses his left hand to grip uke’s left lapel from underneath uke’s right arm. The throw is a sacrifice as tori goes to the mat while wheeling uke over him (tori more or less does a left side fall under uke, undercutting uke’s feet). There’s some sort of off-balance to bring uke forward while doing this. The black belt did this wicked fast and I was on the mat before I knew what was happening.

(There was some technical discussion after this, mainly having to do with obscure judo rules that doesn’t count this throw as an ippon for some reason, even though other similar sacrifices count. It’s, however, apparently a reasonable entry into ground work. It was noted that the throw is hard to pull off against a black belt, but apparently it works just fine on gokyus.)

I’m considering doing this in aikido on cross-hand wrist grabs. The judo grip goes much further up the arm (at least by the elbow) than on a straight wrist grab, so tori/nage won’t be able to control uke’s body quite as well, I think. But it’ll be nicely surprising throw.

Holland America sent us a “Planning & Advice” booklet for our upcoming Alaska trip, one section of which said to register valuables with U.S. Customs to avoid any hassles when re-entering the country. We’re stopping in Vancouver for a couple of days, so we don’t bypass Customs through the Holland America shuttle. On the other hand, it’s somewhat unlikely that we would be nailed for the old laptop and less-than-new-and-not-that-costly camera equipment: the page has a certain CYA feel to it, on the part of Holland America. We got the electronics registered, anyway.

Registration is done at the cargo inspection office in Middleburg Heights. Earlier, I had thought it’d be done at the airport, according to someone I spoke to on the phone at some other Service Port office, but the person at the airport corrected me and sent me to the right place (which is down the road from the airport).

The required for is Customs Form 4457. Note that the online forms on that page (both PDF and Wizard) are for Form 4455, which is for commericial shippers. As far as I can tell, 4457 isn’t on the website; I filled mine in by hand once I got there. The officer there was friendly and helpful, and the whole thing took 10 minutes. It’s basically a piece of paper that you would present at Customs when returning to the country. There’s a list of items and their serial numbers, with the remaining regions of white space X’ed out and stamped by the Customs officer. It’s apparently good as long as its still legible. The officer also mentioned that invoices for the items would be just as good as this Form.

Thinking about this whole thing from a security standpoint, the resources Customs devotes to this is small because the potential duties collected on such personal goods is kind of small. One can always envision a centralized system where your registry of personal items is stored, etc., but that’s a large enforcement expenditure for something relatively penny ante. For this purpose, the low-tech written form and stamp is sufficient.

Update: Here’s the URL to the right form as a PDF: Form 4557

Here’s a handy chart detailing the various plastics used in packaging and products, identified by their recycling number. It’s handy to figure out what you can do to a given plastic bottle, in terms of heating or storing stuff in it.

I found this chart after a discussion on whether it was safe to microwave milk in yogurt containers, as part of the sterlization process for making yogurt at home.

The yogurt containers I have from the store are labeled with recycling code 5 (Polypropylene), which is the code found on, say, Tupperware. With a melting point of 145C, this should be safe for any reasonable microwaving application. (Though I suppose there are people who believe that microwaves and plastic don’t mix in general, as noted, polypropylene is used in your lunch box, so if reheating leftovers in the container is fine, so is sterilizing milk for yogurt).

This page has recommendations for cleaning plastic laboratory containers, and notes that autoclaving polypropylene is perfectly fine.

I’m not sure how yogurt companies make their yogurt. I’m pretty sure — given the smoothness and lack of whey — that yogurt is incubated in the containers themselves. How do yogurt makers sterilize their containers in the manufacturing process? Sterlize beforehand? Put hot, just-pasturized milk directly in the containers and cool down the whole thing on the line?

One of those things to tuck away for future reference, in case it’s ever needed.

A question was posted on the company’s technical discussion mailing list, asking what the best way would be to recover data from a failing USB external drive, without resorting to professional data recovery services.

It turned out that chkdsk /f was sufficient, but SpinRite was brought up as something to try. The current version can work with multiple file systems, apparently including the one used by Tivo (Media File System? I don’t remember.)

This is handy to know about and have in the back pocket: one problem with WinXP is that one can’t RAID at the software level, and the current workstation doesn’t have a hardware RAID controller installed. I have one of those eggs-in-one-basket feelings every once in a while, even though I do off-site backup, etc.

1/2 cup warm water
1 package dried yeast
3 tablespoons sugar
6 eggs
1 pound unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 pound unsalted butter, cut in chunks

Note that eggs and butter should be at room temperature.

Combine the water, yeast, and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer for 5 minutes.

Add the eggs and beat on medium speed until well mixed.

Add half of the flour and the salt and mix on low speed for 5 minutes.

Switch to dough hook and add remaining cups of flour and mix for 5 more minutes.

Add the butter in and mix for 2 minutes until well blended.

Add in any extra flour so that dough becomes a ball while mixing. Continue on low speed for 2 minutes. Put dough in greased bowl, cover and refrigerate overnight.

Let the dough get to room temperature. Divide the dough into approx. 20 rolls and place on sheet pans. Leave enough room for the dough to double in volume over two hours (covered).

Brush the top of each with a milk-egg wash and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. For a loaf of about half the dough, bake time should be around 40 minutes. As usual, use a probe thermometer to check if the internal temperature is above 200F.