The Alaskan is a hotel and bar downtown and Friday night
there was a live bluegrass band playing 10pm-3am. Steve and I and a handful of students (maybe
a dozen or so) met up down there. The
bar is ancient, by Juneau standards. The ventilation was terrible, so after a
few songs where people were dancing and stomping along to the music quite
vigorously, it was getting pretty fragrant in there…sweat, beer, the
omnipresent wet fish smell, and cigarette smoke drifting in from outside.
It was, hands down, the most epic people watching EVER. I’ve never in my life seen such a mix of
people in one place; I wish I could have taken pictures. Anything goes – that’s how people dress down
here. There were girls in little black
dresses (some wearing their Xtratuff boots as footwear), guys in sport coats
and some in flannel. Carhartt jackets or
pants, leather, sweats, shorts, pants, sandals, hiking boots, dressed up,
dressed down, hippies, dreadlocks, yuppies, crunchy granola tree huggers,
bearded mountain men…everything…all in one place, and all hanging out (and
dancing) together. According to one of the students who was born
and raised in Juneau, it was about half locals, half summer workers living it
up as the tourist season winds down. It
was awesome.
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