Alaska Trip: Victoria

A reader tells me that the reason that these Alaska cruises always include at least one non-U.S. port is that ships traveling between U.S. ports need to have an entirely American crew. I have a vague recollection that transport between U.S. ports needs to be entirely on U.S. flagged vessels. This explains the stop in Victoria, British Columbia, I suppose.

We decided to walk into town from the dock because it was only a mile, and the weather was very nice. The neighborhoods we passed through reminded me very much of Santa Monica, where my wife and I met and married--a place with lots of warm memories, although it has become paradoxically too rundown and too expensive for us to live in now. (Liberals take over a city, and pretty soon, there are three classes of people: impoverished servants, homeless people, and wealthy liberals.)

On the beach, we saw this dog, and all I could think of was the song, "High Hopes."



We passed the British Columbia Parliament building.



I didn't want to lug the Pentax, and here is a reminder that a digital zoom has its limitations!





In front of the Parliament building is this memorial to Canada's war dead.



We went by the Empress Hotel--where my wife had hoped to take high tea, but we arrived in port a bit late. (The 1999 trip to Britain seems to have gone to her head. We no longer drink Lipton's tea at home.)







The flowers are just gorgeous everywhere along the coast--although the amount of rain we are getting here in Idaho these last few days, and it will become like Victoria.





Ah, Canada, the liberal's dream of social equality! We saw this private yacht (with helicopter) in the harbor, flying the Canadian flag.



[Ooops! Turns out to be an American. A friend looked up the tail number on the helicopter, and found out it belongs to Dennis Washington.]

And unfortunately, anywhere that you have MTV, you have this stuff.



Along the railroad tracks from Heathrow to London there was so much of this graffiti, I thought I was in Venice, California.

Friends know that I don't normally eat anything that comes out of the ocean. When I was just old enough to peer over the table top, my family got a fish off the end of San Pedro Pier, and brought it home to clean and cook. Ever since, I have been so traumatized by it that if it looks or smells like fish, I get nauseated. It's an irrational reaction--I can eat fishsticks, or McDonald's Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, or fish and chips--no problem! Since Victoria is a very English city, we wandered the streets until we found a fish and chips place, and ate dinner there. And it was delicious.

One little surprise. The menu had something called poutine that was completely new to me. As Wikipedia explains:

Poutine (pronounced, roughly, poo-tin; pronunciation in IPA as heard in Quebec French [puʦɪn] — listen to it in .wav format) is a dish consisting of French fries topped with fresh cheese curds and covered with hot gravy (usually brown gravy) and sometimes other additional ingredients. The curds' freshness is important as it makes them soft in the warm fries, without completely melting. It is a quintessential French-Canadian comfort food.

I can't claim that it is going to send me on expeditions into Canada to get some more, but it was tasty, and probably bad for my health.