| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 14 February 2005 |
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07/24/97 The Journey and the Overview of Vancouver
07/25/97 The UBC Museum of Anthropology and the Shopping Trip
07/26/97 The Aquarium and the Dawn Princess
07/27/97 The Lectures and the Play
07/28/97 Ketchikan and the Gold Rush Lecture
07/29/97 What is so rare as a day in Juneau?
07/30/97 The City Tour and the Horse Trail
07/31/97 The Glacier and the Pirate Play
08/01/97 The Small Animals and the Large Glaciers
08/02/97 Seward and Anchorage
08/03/97 The Museum and the Trip Home
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07/24/97 The Journey and the Overview of Vancouver
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Not the most auspicious of starts. We are headed to the airport in a rain. At least we are going east coast to west coast. I don't know what the weather patterns are in Western Canada. I hope they are better than here. Our last trip that started out in such bad weather was Spain and it was cold and rainy the entire time we were in Spain.
I usually try to start a trip log with a consideration of why we chose the particular place we are going. This time it is easy. My parents planned the trip. This is a family trip. I will be traveling with two parents, Harold and Mildred Leeper. Somewhere along the line they picked up the nicknames 'Dad' and 'Mom.' There is my sister Sherry Glotzer, six years and four months my senior. Then there is her husband David Glotzer. There is my brother David, about a month shy of three years my senior. His wife is Susan. And they have two children, Sara and Jack. Then there is Evelyn Chimelis Leeper, my lovely wife. And there is me. The idea was to go as a group on a cruise to Alaska. We are going really posh, at least for Evelyn and me. We are taking the Dawn Princess, a huge cruise ship that was new this last spring. I am sure I will be describing it in the course of this log.
Evelyn and I have taken cruises before, but never particularly fancy ones. We cruised on the Amazon with a little Brazilian boat, maybe 100 feet long. This was nobody's idea of luxury. Luxury was having drinkable water that did not smell too bad. The cabins were hot, barely large enough to bunk two beds on top of each other, and open at the top so you basically shared your cabin with every other passenger. Slightly more comfortable, but still not cruise line standards, was the boat we had in the Galapagos that same trip. Then later we took a Nile cruise we were on a reasonable boat. I guess you measure reasonable by decent food. There were no onboard activities we did not create for ourselves. There were little facilities beyond a dining room, the staterooms, and a bar. Now Dawn Princess is supposed to be one of the most luxurious boats afloat. The pictures make it look big and sleek and white.
I must be more nervous about this trip than most. I had a hard time sleeping last night. I wasn't trying to stay up as a cure for jet-lag, I just had this hard time sleeping. I didn't want to wake Evelyn so took my pillow in the other room, put the TV on 'sleep' and watched a movie until it put me to sleep. The movie was George Cukor's TWO-FACED WOMAN. I had never seen the film before and didn't really this time since I did fall asleep on it. This was Greta Garbo's last film. The myth was that at the height of her popularity she decided she did not want to be a star and went to live in seclusion. Possibly true, but I am not sure I believe it after seeing some of this film. First of all it is an attempted screwball comedy. The problem is that it was just not at all funny. That alone would not hurt her career. But this is different from her previous films in two important regards. One, Cukor does not use a soft focus. In the cold, sharp light of day she looks like just another blond. But Cukor also tones down her accent considerably. The latter is a disaster. As little Ninotchka, in spite of her bravado there was a certain frailty. There was a certain glamour in being foreign and frail. Make her an autocratic ski instructor and she is no longer frail, at least in this film. Take away so much of her accent and she is one more naturalized American, not just for this film, but for her career. It takes away what was unique about her. I think TWO-FACED WOMAN was a poison pill to her career anyway.
Well after about 40 minutes I fell asleep but woke up again. This time I put on HAROLD AND MAUDE. This was a formative film for me. It may not have changed my philosophy, but it made me more of what I would have been anyway. EASY RIDER leaves me cold but HAROLD AND MAUDE with its theme repeated over and over of being an individual instead of doing what was expected probably warped me for life. I bet this is a film that would fall utterly flat in Japan.
Mercifully I fell asleep on the movie and Evelyn had to wake me up at 4:40am for our 5am pickup. I had set my alarm for 4am but it had not done the trick. (Actually it went off later in the day at 4pm.) This is one of the rare times Evelyn has ever had to wake me up. The driver actually arrived a bit early.
Well we were among the first to the gate. They say these days that you should arrive 90 minutes before the flight, but they don't need nearly that much time.
They gave us seating for the second flight, Detroit to Vancouver. But not together.
They also now say that no electronic devices may be on from the moment you sit down on the plane. You will be told later when some can be turned back on. That seems excessive. But then once we were in the air they told us within five minutes that we could turn on electronic devices. As usual, I am logging the trip in an HP 200LX. I tried to doze off a little before and during takeoff, but it did not really take.
The flight went from 7am to 8:30am. No breakfast. I just got a cup of orange juice. The airlines are really cutting back and Northwest Orient seems worse than most. It never fails that if I eat at home, they feed me on the plane. If I skip breakfast... Well, I'm dieting anyway. I bet once I get on the ship I will eat more than my share.
We landed in Detroit, went to the new gate and Evelyn arranged to get our seats reassigned so we will sit together.
At about 9:15 we boarded the plane. The flight attendant found a man stowing a fishing pole and explained that the rule was if you bring on fishing pole on board the price is on big fish-not little but big-per flight attendant.
We left Detroit about 10:10 on the leg to Vancouver. Detroit was my old stamping grounds in the days I worked for Burroughs. We made some good friends, but did not like the city in general. We liked three things: our friends; the fact that Windsor, Canada was so close; and it was a great restaurant town. The auto companies had brought in a lot of different ethnic groups, but did not pay them very well. The result is a lot of great ethnic restaurants that did not overcharge.
Well, we are on our way to Vancouver, which I tell Evelyn is French for 'Covered Van.' I am probably wrong, but it sounds good.
Breakfast included a choice of items. I had cereal, a bagel (actually more like a bagel-shaped roll), yogurt, a banana, and a glass of spicy tomato juice.
At about 10:20 Vancouver time (I am switching over, it is 1:20 at home) the ground under the plane has become hilly and the peaks are covered With snow in late July, we must be getting up north. About half an hour later we are over farmland, low hills, and a river. Well, in Vancouver sunup is currently at 5:34am and it sets at 9:02pm. That is a couple of minute short of 15 ½ hours. The day we hit Anchorage, the sun will be up 5:35a to 10:33p or two minutes short of 17 hours. however today the sun is up there 5:13a and sets 10:56p or 17 hours and 43 minutes. I guess that means the day is will be 45 minutes shorter in a week than it is today. Summer leave this area really quickly.
We landed about 11:30. The people behind us on the plane are also on the cruise. Not too surprising, since of the capacity of the ship is over 2000 passengers.
The airport is decorated in what look like Indian motifs. It is decorated in beiges and greens and looks very Pacific Northwest. We stand in line at immigration and a man with a black Labrador walks up and down the queues sniffing for banned substances. The dog is a better detective than the human and all he gets is a can of horsemeat.
The immigration official asked us if we were Devil's fans. I guess you have to know all the US local teams if you are an immigration official. Customs was a wave-through. We got money with a credit card and went off in search of bus 100. Evelyn went to explore and decide to take the Airporter instead. That's $9. I will quote all prices in Canada in Canadian dollars. There is about $1.38C in $1 American. This bus is about $6.50 in US. The bus seems to be more service-oriented than I would expect at home. Luggage is stored on the bus (as opposed to under it), but they still load it for the passenger. I guess they want to keep the passenger passenging.
This seems like an area with a big Chinese contingent. There are LOTS of Chinese restaurants. We will not starve. The weather has turned beautiful. Blue overhead and a few billowy white clouds on the horizon. The architecture could be Californian crossed with a bit of English. For those who know the town, we are on Granville St.
The downtown area seems to feature a lot of buildings with green or blue tinted glass. They also go in big for billboards that show you three ads with vertical rotating columns. There are a lot of nice tall buildings, but nothing like West Shinjuku.
We got to the end of the bus line and had to search to find our Hotel Sylvia. It is sort of old-ish and ivy-covered. It could be better maintained, but it is nice and convenient. We dropped off our things in the room. We headed out to find lunch on Denman Street, a street whose restaurants we were ogling from the bus.
On the way we got a bus pass for the day. It is $4.50. It is a card that is covered with silver paint like scratch-off. You scratch off on place for the month and one for the day of the month. You have to scratch off for one date only and then the ticket is good for any rides on just that date. If you are wrong about what today's date is you can actually purchase a second chance at only $4.50. It's that simple.
I think I would like to spend a few days here just going to restaurants. We decided to get a small lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant called Vina. They has lunch dishes for $6.95. That would be cheap in US money, but it is really about $5.02. The lunch special was a choice of two entree samples. We got a fried platter. (Shoot, what was it that was fried? It was good, but I should have made a better note.) We also got a Hot and Sour Clam Soup. The former came with dishes of two sauces, one like a Hoi-sin sauce, one the Vietnamese sweet and sour clear sauce with carrot. The soup had a pineapple and a clam flavor. It was a pretty good lunch.
After lunch we got on a rather crowded bus for Gastown. It is named for saloonkeeper 'Gassy' Jack Deighton and his 'gassy' stories. The bus on the way was really packed. We talked to a woman about what was good to see. We told her how beautiful the city seemed to us. She agreed that the residents think it is a beautiful city and told us some things worth doing.
Vancouver is a city with a long heritage much like San Francisco's. Most cities must have had eccentrics in their founding but like San Francisco, Vancouver likes to keep that heritage alive. That is why there is a part of the city named Gastown for Gassy Jack. His statue is one of the attractions. |
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