Regina Glei's Blog, page 18

US Travels – Part 4: Cruise Ship

This was my first time ever on a real big cruise ship. I’ve been on plenty of boats of all sizes but before the “Independence of the Seas” the biggest thing I rode on might have been the ferry between Melbourne and Devonport in Tasmania or the Ogasawara Maru brining me from Tokyo to the Ogasawara islands. Well, the Independence of the Seas seems to be as big as it gets. It’s the biggest cruise ship class that there is and it’s a 154,000 tons ship, so it’s actually 70,000 tons of metal times two, but maybe if you subtract all the plastic, wood, glass etc. you end up with 70,000 tons of metal

US Travels – Part 3: Fort Lauderdale, or rather Everglades

Let me say right in advance that I saw nothing of Fort Lauderdale, except for the airport, my hotel and the Port of the Everglades, first of all no time, second no car, but I did manage to squeeze in a short excursion into the Everglades on the way back from the cruise.

It wasn’t so easy to get onto that excursion, since the tour operator was unhappy with having to pick up only one paying customer. But after some back and forth with the hotel reception, I finally got the green light. They said they’d pick me up at 1:45 pm, then they called the hotel reception again and announced that they’d only come at 2:30, no reason given. Eventually they came to pick me up at 2:45. Wow, an hour late. These Florida dudes are very laid back.

Before the tour bus came, I wanted to go on a little stroll down to the marina which I had discovered on google maps, but getting close it was all fenced off and private and only for boat owners. Too bad.

Finally the tour bus came and there was a couple who just went onto the Walking Dead cruise. Oh wow, didn’t know they have that! And two ladies from Scotland who went on a “normal” cruise to Costa Rica.

Arrived in the Everglades, we boarded an airboat (mighty loud and fast) and they took us around for an hour on the boat into the wetlands. Another group of guests, Peruvian it seems, were bored and fussing about. Now what did they expect? Gators jumping into their laps? We were all quite annoyed with the group who were giggling and talking and didn’t let us hear the explanations of the boat captain.





I liked the tour, we saw many different birds, two iguanas lounging in trees and we saw four alligators, one cute little one swimming, two sunning on shore and one in the water peaking at us.





Next up was the souvenir store and then a gator show. The gator boy holding the show said the alligators in captivity are nuisance gators who showed up in people’s gardens and ate their dogs or cats. Such alligators are either killed or the luckier ones end up in a zoo or gator park like this one. They can’t release such alligators who went for dinner into someone’s backyard into the wild again, since they associate your backyard with good food and come back. The gator boy was walking around in the water pool for the gators and picked one up as if it was a dog, put it on the ground and then opened the gators mouth, put his face in and other spectacular stuff like that. All for show, since, he is a “volunteer” and lives off tips.



A word about tipping, that tipping system is pretty terrible. You gotta tip everyone, the bus driver of the tour, the boat driver of the tour, the gator boy. Damn it, just someone pay these guys decent wages! Coming from Japan where there is zero zero tipping, I find this system pretty inconvenient and annoying. I don’t know how much to tip either, sigh.

Then I had a bit of a happening because I forgot my iPhone in the tour car that brought me back to the hotel. When I noticed, the tour desk was already closed. I ended up having to phone them at 7 the next morning when their office opened as the super friendly hotel front desk staff found out for me. The driver of the bus came in an hour later and thank goodness they found the phone and brought it back to the reception of the hotel! There were a ton of not yet iCloud saved photos from the cruise on it, kyaaaaaaa…. but luckily I got the phone back, phew!

US Travels – Part Two: Detroit, not really, and only a little bit of politics

The second leg of the business trip part of my US travels involved going to our office in a town called Plymouth, Michigan. Some 35 km away from Detroit.

The flight to Detroit from Cincinnati was short and uneventful. Since Detroit does not have the reputation to be the safest city in the world, I was a bit concerned and had ordered kind of a limo service to pick me up. My driver turned out to be a gentleman from Bangladesh who came to America 23 years ago. So much for immigrants. He complained that thanks to Uber business is slow for the pro drivers.

It was biting cold in Michigan but no snow yet. My hotel turned out to be a blessing, since it shared the same parking lot as a Trader Joe’s supermarket and a hot sandwich joint. So carless me was able to buy some food. Up a side road, the way lead to a Panera Bread shop and a Target supermarket. On my Sunday off, I dared to venture to the Target on foot and did some shopping with lunch at Panera Bread. Needless to say that I was the only person far and wide who was walking. There are no pedestrian pavements either and you have to walk on the street.

Target is not high class material when it comes to clothing, but you gotta take what you can get and I must admit that I enjoyed shopping for pants my size… an impossibility in Japan

The Ban and its Consequences

I just flew from Detroit to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and next to me on the plane sat an elderly Muslim couple in western clothes, but the lady wore a veil.

We started talking (the lady and I) and here is her story. She and her husband are from Syria, in the US for 45 years, he is a medical doctor, she did not tell me if she is pursuing a profession. They are US citizens and have US passports, but her sister has only a green card. Two weeks ago, her sister went to Damascus for family reasons for a month and while she is out of the country Trump decrees his travel ban.

Now they are unsure whether the sister can return to the US as scheduled despite having a green card… she has two sons in college here waiting for her to return.

The lady started crying while she talked and I held hands with her. We were whispering while we talked, as if we were speaking of something forbidden. I told her I’m German and just a guest here for two and a half weeks. When I planned this trip America was still America. We talked about having not learned from history. 80 years ago Jews were at first discriminated, then hunted and killed in Germany and now…?

The lady said that she cannot believe that this is the 21st century. When she came to the US as a young woman, half a child still, it was the land of her dreams, now she is afraid.

A friend of hers was harassed even before the Trump era, they pulled him out and asked him if he believes in God and hell. The lady spoke to a lawyer after that happened and he advised her not to answer such questions in case somebody asked her.

Nobody ever asked me when I crossed whatever border whether I am Catholic or Protestant or whatever else… incredible.

Seeing it on TV is bad enough, but being face to face with it gives it an even more intense dimension.

What the fxxk, America, where the hell are you going? Today, 1st of February 2017, you are not the world’s greatest democracy anymore, far from it…

I could do nothing but hold hands with the Syrian-American lady, I wish I could have done more…

US Travels – Part One: Cincinnati – kinda, and no politics included

So, on the road yet again, this time to the US of A. A combination of business trip and some holidays to attend the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise! At first business, the fun later.

Business led me to Kentucky and to Michigan. My first stop was a small town close to Cincinnati called Florence where one of the plants of the company I work for is located, then on to our office in a town called Plymouth, close to Detroit.

I didn’t see anything of Cincinnati unfortunately and nothing much of Florence either, first because it was winter, second because I was there only on working days, and third because I don’t drive by myself due to my well-reported car driving phobia.

Colleagues took me out to dinner though and drove me around a bit and my impression was that Florence is a 1000% car town. Nobody was walking the streets anywhere I went. Everything is spread out, the area is basically flat with a few soft hills and without a car you are totally screwed. You drive to the parking lot of the restaurant and walk in five meters and that’s it.

It’s been five years since I’ve last been to the States, and I had forgotten the pain of choices. You can’t just get a smoked salmon bagel, you have to decide if you want cream cheese or not, if you want to have capers, tomatoes and onions with it or not, next, what kind of bagel, meaning type of bread, and last but not least whether you want your bagel bread toasted or not, big laugh. And that for everything, how you want your meat, with which sauce, what dressing from a choice of ten for your salad. It’s nice to have choices, but it takes forever to order. At times it was hard for me to understand what the waiters were saying with their thick American accents and I had to exert patience not to say I don’t care, just give me a stupid bagel! Lol.

Whilst there is an enormous choice of foods in Japan there are hardly any or no variants to the selections. You have the ten different ramen variants already laid out for you and the selection does not have to be specified further, for example.

Another thing that struck me is the nature of the TV ads. There is a hell of a lot of medicine TV ads, much more than in Japan, and also medical recall ads for such obscure things as spidery constructs some people put into their clotted veins to unclot them and now the plastic or whatever pieces wander through the body and might cause damage to arteries and internal bleeding. Holy crap, have so many people done this to their bodies that they need a TV ad about it??? The fancy named drugs presented seem to be monstrous creations considering the possible side effects they rattle off during the ad. Another prominent feature in ads is security related things, cyber security, whatever other security for your house, your computer, what the heck. No wonder people are afraid if even the ads blast danger at you 24/7, not to speak of the news…

Another topic that struck me was how empty the airports of Cincinnati and Detroit were. Well, it’s a big country, but I wonder if it’s always that empty at these airports or whether it was the season or a not so good economic situation?

One word about my hotel in Florence. They were refurbishing some of the rooms with the guests in attendance, lol. In the morning I had a green sofa, in the evening I had a blue sofa and some styrofoam packaging bits lying on the ground next to it. What? Lol. Couldn’t they wait with that until the next change of guests? Very odd, but hey, my butt was thus the first that graced the new blue sofa.

Anyway, thanks to work, the few days in Florence went by quickly and on I went to Detroit.

Okinawa Main Island Report – Part 3

Minnajima

Thanks to the internet I found out that the other island visible from Sesoko beach next to Iejima is also inhabited and that there is a ferry going there. The island is called Minna and the much smaller ferry to it left from a small port called Toguchi not too far away from Motobu port. There were two ferries per day during the winter, one left at 11:00, the other at 17:00. If you go with the one at 11:00 you can catch the ferry back to the main island at 14:00, which is the last ferry leaving back to the mainland.





Minna Island is so far the tiniest inhabited island I have been to. There are fifty or less people living there.

I asked at the harbor whether I can take my bicycle. A guy in the office, who turned out to be the ferry’s captain, said you don’t need a bicycle, you can walk the entirety of the island in one hour and the roads are too bad too. Okay

Okinawa Main Island Report – Part 2

Iejima

I had checked for departure times the day before at the port and went there to catch the 11:00 ferry to Iejima together with my bicycle since this is a car ferry. I haven’t been on too many car ferries yet in my life and was amazed that the cars have to drive into the ferry backwards. Gulp. I love my sweet little bicycle that they stored in a corner of the ship.



While I’m a little scared of small boats for less than ten people, I love big or bigger ships and greatly enjoyed the short, 30 min, ride to Iejima.



Arrived there, I went straight to the prominent central mountain, just to take a look, not expecting that you could get on top. But, you can get on top! Someone bothered to build sturdy concrete stairs up to the very top of the mountain.



I always admire the pioneers who put those stairs there in the first place. That must have been quite a job. The stairs are steep and tiring, but the view from the top of the mountain is breathtaking. You see the island in its entirety and the ocean with the other islands around it is amazing. That view alone is worth a trip to Iejima.



I bicycled around a bit and then headed for the western half of the island. Most of it is off limits, US army base….

But before the base is a cave that I wanted to see. The cave was of course used by the villagers on the island during WW2 as a shelter. It also would have been or maybe was an excellent pirate cave

Okinawa Main Island Report – Part 1

After visiting the Okinawa Prefecture islands of Miyako and Ishigaki, this time I went to the Okinawa main island.

I’ve actually been there once before, a shocking 22 years ago! OMG! I once went to Okinawa by ship from Kyushu while I was having my exchange student year in Fukuoka. That time I stayed in Naha, the main town, and did some bus tours around the island.

This time I chose something quieter further north (Naha is the southern area of the island) and booked a room on Sesoko island. A sleepy place separated from the main island by a canal of seawater and connected with it via a 700 meter bridge.

The flight to Naha was of course fully packed, since it’s high traveling season in Japan over the new year holidays. Haneda airport was crowded but it was not as bad as I thought. I had asked the hotel a few weeks before departure how I’m supposed to get to them and they recommended to take a bus called Yanbaru Express. I checked in the internet for it and wow, it would take two hours by bus from Naha airport to the port of Motobu where I was supposed to get off and where the hotel people would pick me up.

Even from 22 years ago I remember that the traffic in Naha was a pain. Apparently that has not improved much, loads of stop and go, but once we were on the 53 km long highway of Okinawa, things went a bit quicker. Well, but then another reason for the two hour ride to Motobu was that we shall make a break in between at a highway rest area. Lol.

The driver stopped the bus for ten minutes at half his route, which is in total apparently two and a half hours long. Lol. They ain’t doing that in Tokyo

New Neighborhood

One of the nice things of moving is that you get to explore your new neighborhood

Recent/not so Recent Movie Reviews

Because of moving and new job it’s been a damn long while since I’ve been to my beloved movies, but at least I got to see some stuff on the plane rides back and forth from Germany.

Star Trek Beyond

Hmpf… whilst I am a huge Star Trek fan (especially Next Generation) and whilst I think the new/old crew is excellent, and whilst I enormously enjoyed their first get-together and so/so enjoyed “Into Darkness”, “Beyond” deeply disappointed. This thing felt like an average TV episode and totally failed to inspire. While there were some nice moments between Bones and Spock reminding of their original series days, that was about it. The villain was lame, the story elements all of the kind: seen them a million times before.

What the new crew desperately needs is a big picture, some story ark that spans over a couple of movies, that connects it to the rest of the Star Trek universe, hints at the Borg, or starting to meet the Klingons, or the Romulans, or Q, or something-anything! not lame villains that get defeated and that we will never hear of again… I hope the writers will find their way back into the bigger picture of the Star Trek universe…

Warcraft

I am not a Warcraft player at all and I don’t intend to become one but, hey, I liked this movie. It was, in contrast to Star Trek Beyond, much better than I had expected. I played my fair share of fantasy role playing games and they captured the atmosphere quite nicely in that movie. Cool villains, magic that’s dangerous and corrupts, heroes with some dents in their armors. The orks were real characters, not mere monsters and there were some deaths to report too that I had not expected in that form. On top of that a well fitting Travis Fimmel, who I already like a lot as our Viking overlord Ragnar Lothbrok. I hope they make more Warcraft movies.

Money Monster

The movie is a bit hard to watch at times, at least for me, since it’s too loud, too over the top and too TV-preacher like. The movie felt though, involuntarily, very close to the Trupfuckistan disaster that started a month ago. Idiots who believe every crap that other idiots broadcasts, sensationalism, false, unverified news, materialism… the whole Trumpfuckistan show. And in the end the bitter pill that the little man gets killed, and the rich fucks become richer on the backs of others. Very nice performance from George Clooney also.

Independence Day: Resurgence

Yawn. I never would pay a single dime for such a movie at the theater. The original wasn’t that thrilling to begin with and why the hell do you have to rehash it and make a sequel? Emmerich said himself once the original is more a disaster movie than a science fiction movie and disaster movies have no sequels. He should have stayed true to himself and not have wasted tons of money for the production of this lame remake. Not worth seeing, not worth remembering and sorry, I can’t find anything good to say about this one.