ALASKA

Here I am in Juneau! I'm going to try to post properly for the next five months, since I'll (hopefully!) be going on adventures and meeting cool people and doing fun things and having interesting thoughts as I live and work in Skagway.

Here's the debrief for today:

Got up at 4:45 am! Caught at cab at 5:30 am! Got to the airport, only to find that while my ticket said Alaska Airlines from JFK, there is no Alaska Airlines at JFK, and it took 15 minutes and 4 airport workers to figure out that it was run through Delta! Also found amid all that that I had left my cell phone in the cab! A nice security guard let me borrow his phone to call Alex to get the cab company number (because I only had it programmed in my phone...) so I could call the cab company and ask them to look for my phone. Which they told me they couldn't find. So I gave them Alex's number for if they found it, and gave up and went through security, since I had only five minutes left to check in. (They put me through the expedited security lane, which was awesome, btw! Didn't have to take off shoes or jacket or accessories! Didn't have to take out my computer!) And then as soon as I called Alex (on a coworker's borrowed phone), when I got to the gate, he reported that they had found it and called him but now the cab was too far from the airport to bring it back (plus we were boarding in like five minutes), so he had to go to the cab depot, and hopefully it is now on its way to me via the mail! Augh.

So, you know, one of those mornings. But flying is lovely, and here I am in Juneau! The day is beautiful! I AM IN ALASKA WHAT

The thing about flying into Juneau is that you are for hours just flying over snowcapped mountains, and it's like, where are we going to land? We are just in the mountains? Where is Juneau? And then boom all of a sudden you have landed in Juneau. Which is tiny. But not as tiny as Skagway! Anyway, I don't know that I realized that THERE ARE NO ROADS THAT GO TO JUNEAU. I guess that's a thing that everyone knows, but I didn't. I've been joking that going to this job is like going to Siberia or something, but it's not that far from the truth in terms of how hilariously isolated and far from everything these parts of Alaska are. Weird. But cool!

BTW, flying into SEA-TAC for our brief layover was also freaking gorgeous. I don't remember ever really seeing Seattle from overhead like that - maybe it's always been overcast when I flew in, or maybe I was never on a window seat. But - wow. And the airport itself is lovely, too! Props, Seattle.

I'm wearing out a bit on telling the story of my day, since I'm exhausted (but trying to stay up until 8pm at least, though I got up at 4am Eastern and now it feels like midnight to me, since ya gotta fight the jetlag immediately yo) and have been telling various parts of it to various people. But in brief, it is beautiful and sunny (although the locals were raving about how it was an unusually nice day, which is a bit alarming, and kept telling us how windy Skagway is, which is also alarming); I got to know a couple of my coworkers and they are great; Juneau is just gearing up for the season, so many of the shops are not open but some are, and the owners are just hanging around being friendly; you can walk around the whole downtown in two hours, which is ridic to me for a state capital but neat; and we learned from some locals that yes, those giant crows were actually ravens, and also they are bringers of light in Tlingit stories.

Also, this happened...

http://www.adn.com/2014/04/24/3439788/skagway-ferry-dock-sinks.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ALASKA

So we'll not, obviously, be taking the ferry to Skagway as planned tomorrow. We will be taking a 6-person propellor plane, over glaciers and evergreens and fjords. I am freaking psyched. Updates ASAP! :) :) :)

OMG I AM IN ALASKA

AND LOOK AT IT

FREAKING LOOK AT IT

WHAT