Japan 2...mostly fishy

Now for some pictures from my good camera. I didn't have a ton of free time (six days of meetings...one early dismissal afternoon and one day off at the end...).  I did visit two aquariums and did some sightseeing in Sapporo one hot sticky afternoon.

The first aquarium was really small, but they had a touch tank of those little fish that I've heard about that nibble on your dead skin during a pedicure. It tickled on my hand - I can't imagine how tickly it would be on feet!

This is a real starfish, I swear. It looks fake though, like a plush starfish, it even has a seam...except that it's real. How awesome is that?

The view from my hotel room. Meh.

A covered shopping street in Sapporo. It doesn't look 90 degrees with 95% humidity, but it is.  Even my feet were sweating, and then I got blisters.

I love the fake food displays. I don't know that they really help me decide what to order, but at least you can point to whatever it is you decide on.

LOL. What a name...

I love the money there...this tiny  handful of change is, like, 17 US dollars.  It's great!

These adorable chicken in an egg things were very popular...

Just in case you were wondering...

My last day in Japan I took a personal leave day to do a bit more sightseeing (though in hindsight I was really ready to go home). This was by far the coolest (temperature wise) day during my stay in Japan. It was ~75 F and utterly pouring rain, monsoon-style. I was soaking wet to my knees. But it was fun to get out of the big city to a slightly smaller city on the coast, and see another aquarium once the rain stopped.

The canal in Otaru, Japan. In the rain.

This aquarium was much bigger, and had two main areas. One was the main 'fish tank' part up on top of a big hill next to the sea.  The other was down the hill (almost cliffs) next to the sea. 

This is a tank full of things that will kill you. Lion fish, mean eels, some sort of creepy spotted thing, and other fun critters. Unless I knew what something was by sight, or knew the genus and species name (which were in English), I didn't know what things were since the common names were in Japanese.

But this incredible (and HUGE) fish is a humphead wrasse. Very cool!!

Despite it being a Sunday, it wasn't very busy. I was happy about that.

Here's the second part of the aquarium. There were walrus, otters, penquins, seal and sea lions. There was also a place to rent a small pole and fish in a tank full of starry flounder...I am not sure what you do if you catch one - keep it?? 

Japan reboot - food photos mostly

I recently had the very awesome opportunity to visit Sapporo, Japan for a work trip. It was a really great trip (no earthquakes!), with great people, and a very interesting meeting. The only downside was the incredibly, unusually hot weather in Sapporo, which made sitting in a meeting room wearing a business suit rather uncomfortable (I'm been generous - it was miserable in the hot meeting room).  But, I did take a few pictures of some of the fun foods I tried and some of the city sights. 

The food in Japan, particularly the seafood, if really incredible. I love seafood, and I was pretty much willing to try everything at least once.  These are my phone pictures, I'll try to upload some of my good camera pictures next.

Our meeting was in Shin-Sapporo, which means 'new Sapporo' - think suburb. It was ok. But we did take the train to Sapporo quite a lot and this is outside the main train station in Sapporo. For the record, I liked Tokyo better than Sapporo. 

Sapporo is known for ramen. This is one of the ramen dishes I tried during my stay. It was quite good, but rather rich. I didn't really know what I was ordering (not unusual...) and it turned out that this was 'butter corn ramen' or something like that. Yes, that's what's left of a pretty big pat of butter sitting on top of the corn...

This squid was alive a few moments before this picture was taken. No, you don't eat the eyes. It was fantastic though...you dip the strips into soy sauce mixes with some of the grated ginger and wasabi that you see on the plate. YUM! I would eat this again.

An assortment of sushi...tuna, crab, uni (sea urchin roe).  I'm not really a fan of the sea urchin roe...the flavor was good, but the texture was hard to get past. It's...soft, or mushy, or creamy, maybe...but not my favorite.

This is Yuki and Peter. I met Yuki on the airplane coming to Sapporo and she was wonderfully helpful and fun. She and Peter split their time between the US and Japan. They were kind enough to give me a ride to my hotel the first night, then we met up for dinner later in the week. Yuki is from Sapporo, and I let her lead on ordering food for the night, which is how I ended up trying so many new and interesting things.

Beer with frozen beer foam on top. It had the texture of slightly ice-crysally soft serve ice cream, but tasted just like beer foam (so, not really GOOD, just sort of beerish). A novelty, for sure.

Mongolian barbeque...with lamb and veggies and lots of deliciousness.

a little field work

I'm way behind in sharing fun pictures from recent travel.

Back in June I spent 22 fun, occasionally loooong, days on the fishery survey boat for work. We left from Dutch Harbor, AK and fished our way towards Kodiak Island, then right before reaching the island we turned right and headed across the Gulf of Alaska (without fishing) for three days, ending in Ketchikan. The Gulf crossing was a bit long, since by that time you're really sick of boat food and you just Want To Get Off The Boat. So bad.  Instead, you watch movies, do work (catch up on work projects), play cards, eat bad food, do little workouts since there's only little spaces, and sleep.  I didn't take too many pictures this time around. We were pretty busy fishing (which is a good thing).  But here's a few highlights...

Some fishing gear in Dutch Harbor:

Sunrise in Dutch Harbor. So pretty!

Fishing. This is a shortspine thornyhead coming up. They are quite thorny in the head region - watch your fingers!

One of the days on the boat we had absolutely calm, still water for a couple of hours. I spent time between sets up on deck taking pictures of birds (they are always around the boat, and the seagulls poop on deck a lot, so they're not very popular with the crew who has to clean up after them). This might be my best picture ever:

This guy was sitting on the railing and didn't fly away until I was about 3 feet from him/her. 

Coming in for a landing!  Or playing peekaboo??

He was probably about to poop on the deck...

On the last day before getting to Ketchikan we met a tramper (a big barge-like boat that moves things between ports, and has a freezer hold for moving processed fish around too) in a small bay and offloaded the catch so far. Everything gets brought up on deck, restacked by hand onto pallets, then a crane lifts the pallet over to the tramper. It took 8 HOURS to offload. I helped for about 3 hours until my arms were bruised and too tired to lift anymore.  The boat processes almost all the fish caught (not much is discarded) and pretty much everything is frozen within hours of getting caught. It's a very efficient process.

Lower 48 road trip

Last month we went on a road trip, and I am finally sitting down to sort pictures and pick up the blog again. Let's see, since September...we bought a house. It's super cute and we love it. I'm *still* working on school. I love my job.  Now we're up to speed.  : )

We flew into Las Vegas and spent a night there before picking up a camper van from Jucy. The van was both our wheels and our sleeping location (it's in the picture below). It was surprisingly comfortable for the two of us, though we packed too much luggage and were constantly moving things around. There's a bed that pops up out of the purple thing on top, and a the table folds down inside for another bed. The rear door opens like a normal minivan and that's where the kitchen is - it has a sink, one burner stove, fridge and some storage.

We drove to Death Valley first. Gorgeous and it was raining a bit while we were there. It was also super windy, which made sleeping in the pop up bed on top of the van very loud from the rattling canvas.

We did a bunch of short hikes in DVNP. This is Golden Canyon (I'm creepin on Steve's selfie).

 Also Golden Canyon...

 At the top of Golden Canyon you wall out at a towering red cliff face. If you scramble around that a bit, you get a nice view of the 'Valley' part of Death Valley. It was in the low 80s there, much warmer than Vegas was (where it also rained, all day!).

We also hiked Marble Canyon. True to the name, the walls are made of, well, marble I guess, and over many years they have been polished pretty smooth.

After a couple of days we had the great idea to go to Joshua Tree National Park, which is ~4 hours from DVNP by car. It was still windy for the drive, and we passed through a valley that was choked with smog and dust. I didn't really like that part. Ugh.

Joshua Tree National Park was pretty cool. However, it's pretty close to LA and there were a LOT of people there. It was neat to see once. If you were into rock climbing, it would be a pretty spectacular place. Also, there was a pretty major cold snap, so it was about 30 degrees at night. That's pretty chilly for camping! It made morning and evenings tough since we didn't want to get out of bed to make breakfast, nor did we really want to sit around a campfire (also, still windy, so maybe campfires would have been a bad idea for that reason alone). Anyways, it was gorgeous there, and we saw several coyotes.

Cool intrusion of different rock into the big rock. Note the terrible haze/smog/dust in the background.

On one of the hikes we went an old ruin of a mill. There were a couple of old (1940s?) cars broken down and left near the site.

 Finally, a picture of an actual Joshua Tree:

Like I said, lots of climbing happening there. It was cold enough that I feel like my fingers would have  had a hard time holding on!

Enjoying a nice hike in the abundant sunshine.  Even though we were getting out of Juneau and hoping for sun and warmth, we did at least have plenty of sun!

 And typical goofy shenanigans.

And, one night we sort of stayed late enough to see the sunset start. Then it got super cold (and still windy) and we packed it in for the night. Lots of cool coyote howls at night though.