Traffic for 2006 June 7

Today was got to Ketchikan around 11 am and once again had to tender ashore. We had no formal plans this day, so we basically walked the entire city. We found a museum that had a self-guided city tour with monument placards along the way. It was a fun thing for us to do. Ketchikan reminded me a bit of San Francisco. Lots of hills, and lots of tall, skinny houses. Actually, the houses must be mentioned. Most of the houses are seriously four or five stories tall. And the main entrances to all of these houses are on the top level. Needless to say, there must not be a single person out of shape that lives in Ketchikan. Susie about died when she saw this spectacle. I wonder why they build them this way? Though on many of the houses it did appear that the bottom two floors may have been little more than unfinished areas used for storage, based on the structure of the house. I can't imagine hauling groceries up so many stairs.

The city also has a district with houses built on stilts partially over rivers. Hong Kong had similar areas like this in the fishing communities. They all looked quaint, with the exception of one more whore house.

The city walk loops around, so that you take a different pathway home. This took us up a rather steep hill to walk back along a residential ridgeway. There were eagles circling the skies and few decided to land on trees whose tops were level with us being high up on the ridgeway. So we got some excellent pics of wild eagles, and that was a neat thing to me.

Ketchikan gets 13 FEET of rain a year, which means about almost half an inch a day. Wow. That's a lot of rain. But once again we didn't get rained on. The Vacation Gods were indeed smiling down on us. The city also has a lot of totem poles that were removed from the surrounding area to be preserved in the city. They're very tame for totem poles--the Hollywood make believe ones are much more colorful. I wish they had signs on them detailing where they were found with a guesstimated creation date. But oh well.

That night our waiter at dinner asked me and Susie about polygamy. He is from the Philippines and I told him about my mission to the Kong a few days earlier. I could tell he worded his question very carefully, as he didn't want to offend us and thereby get fired. I tried to explain that we don't practice it anymore, but that it is a Christian rite that can be seen in the Bible, and is only practiced by certain people at certain times and left it at that. I think this is one reason that I have become more liberal in my acceptance of ideas that are foreign to me. Polygamy is a touchy subject that a lot of people, including myself, don't understand. How could I look myself in the mirror each day if I condemned others for being different when I am so different, peculiar even, to so many people? It would effectively take my persecuted heritage and revolve it into a persecuting future. I'm not willing to do that. My heritage is too important to me to belittle it like that.