If people won’t support the idea in the name of comfort, speed of boarding/unloading, and overall efficiency, maybe fear of death will make the proposal look better?
A coach seat with a guaranteed empty middle seat provides even more separation from a potentially disease-ridden fellow passenger than a first class seat, right? How is that not worth 50 percent more in the coronavirus age? Set a minimum pitch comparable to JetBlue’s Extra Room seats and everyone can travel again for a reasonable price, with reasonable protection from contagion, a lot faster (total time, including boarding), and with a lot less stress from Fall of Saigon-style lines at the gate. (Throw in a free N95 mask for each passenger as soon as the supply chain returns to normal.)
On a no-plans-in-advance island-hopping trip around the Bahamas everyone we asked for a hotel recommendation in Nassau said “Baha Mar”. The good folks at the Odyssey FBO have a corporate rate with the Hyatt Baha Mar so that’s where we ended up.
The Chinese-built complex is the newest development in Nassau and everything sparkles. Staff members at all of the hotels are friendly and competent.
Budget at least $100 per day per person for food within the complex. Restaurants are good, but everything is about 2X the price of what it would cost in a big U.S. city. Restaurants are crowded at dinner. We had trouble getting a table for two at 7:30 pm on a Thursday.
The epic breakfast buffet is worth it, though Michael Bloomberg would not approve of all of the dessert items available:
A taxi downtown is a fixed $18 for two passengers. There are no independent restaurants within walking distance. There is no Uber in the Bahamas.
There are a fair number of activities within the resort, including a twice-daily flamingo walk, a fountain show every 30 minutes, and a marine animal sanctuary containing sea turtles, sharks, rays, fish, etc.
When the massive hotels are full, the pools are busy and not relaxing. The Rosewood hotel is within the complex, but has its own private pools that are much quieter. If traveling with children, one big issue is that the pools close at 6 pm (maybe later in the summer months?). What are the kids going to do from 6 pm until bedtime? Play the slots?
Rosewood:
The beach is reasonably sheltered and the water is calm, though perhaps not as calm as in Provo (Turks and Caicos).
The gym seems to be shared among all of the hotels and it is huge and blessed with water views.
If you need to get work done or just enjoy Skype with friends around the world, the Chinese-financed and Chinese-built Baha Mar offers a Chinese level of WiFi: at least 75 Mbits symmetric everywhere that I tested and usually a bit more.
The Rainbow Flag Religion is weak here:
Competition: we had wanted to stay in Atlantis, but all of the Bahamians warned us against it. “It need to be renovated” and “It is run down” were typical comments. We hopped in a taxi to Paradise Island (formerly “Hog Island”) and were awed by the lobby of the Atlantis. Public WiFi clocked in at 0.82 Mbits (1/100th the speed of Baha Mar) and then failed altogether. There are herds of cruise ship passengers who come here on tours. To keep them from wandering too far, there are security people everywhere challenging people (most of whom seemed like obvious guests, e.g., with nothing but flipflops and a towel) to see proof of hotel guest status. An adjacent marina has some impressive superyachts and signs telling people not to go anywhere near them (ignored by the Chinese tourists). My friend was unimpressed with the Atlantis: “even the chairs in the casino look old.” The lagoon was deserted.
The veneer of luxury and wealth on Paradise Island is thin. Right across the street is a strip mall with a downscale casino, a grocery store with canned goods, and a Dunkin’ Donuts. Farther to the east is the Ocean Club, run by the Four Seasons. This is a small expensive hotel with a single pool, which was fairly crowded. On a day when the Baha Mar beach was nicely sheltered and perfect for swimming, the Ocean Club beach was hanging a “caution” flag and the water was rough. It is a great place for lunch and probably a great place to stay if you want to get away from the crowds (but, if so, why not simply stay on one of the “out islands”?).
Conclusion: the locals seem to be right about the Baha Mar complex being the best place to stay in and around Nassau. However, you have to want to be in a city-sized development (2,200 rooms) that seems to be quite full even slightly off peak. Imagine a huge cruise ship that never leaves the dock. If you want to be in a smaller scale lower-rise hotel and enjoy a perfect beach, consider flying an extra 30 minutes to Turks and Caicos (Provo).
Separately, as here in Massachusetts, the construction of casinos is encouraged. Unlike in Massachusetts, however, it is illegal for a local to gamble:
Even if coronavirus isn’t a serious statistical risk from being on a cruise ship, I wonder if the public health response will trim the sails (so to speak) of the hitherto unstoppable industry.
Consider the passengers on the Diamond Princess in Japan. Best case for the healthy ones is to be stuck at the dock for 14 days, mostly in their tiny cabins. From NPR:
On the ship, passengers — including some who had already spent two weeks aboard the vessel before the quarantine doubled their stay — are told not to leave their rooms. They visit the deck in shifts, for a rare breath of fresh air.
But there could be days of quarantine after a scare, right? So if you book a cruise from Date X to Date Y you won’t have any guarantee of getting back to work, family, and other commitments.
Does this prove the old adage that being on a boat is like being in prison, except that you can’t drown in prison?
Related:
“Royal Caribbean bans all passengers with Chinese, Hong Kong or Macau passports” (ABC; February 7): Royal Caribbean International announced that any of its passengers holding a Chinese, Hong Kong or Macau passport will not be allowed to board its cruise ships “regardless of when they were there last.” (should be plenty of last-minute rooms available for those with no fear of lockdown)
As you might expect from selection bias (he traveled for 6.5 years while others did not), he’s an enthusiast:
The Chinese proverb “It is better to travel 10,000 miles than read 10,000 books” is more pertinent than ever. For the experiences gained by travel are pulsating and permeated by the breath of human experience and interaction. Book knowledge helps us obtain a basic understanding of subjects and categorize them; it moves in one dimension. Travel is multidimensional: It connects the various branches of human knowledge that are held isolated in unconnected mental compartments; it gives flesh and bones to the world’s nations; it introduces us to new sounds and smells and an infinite variety of circumstances. Travel is not only the Ultimate University but also the only one that is alive!
He points out that Hainan Airlines’s $650 round-trip fare from Boston to Shanghai is an example of what is new for the human race:
This is the first time in the history of humanity that millions of people have the ability and means to travel around the world. What was once the privilege of historians like Herodotus, emperors like Hadrian, royal emissaries like Zhang Qian, intrepid explorers like James Cook, or simply the aristocratic few is now within the reach of the middle class.
Let me put in a plug for the smartphone too! It has its pluses and minuses when at home or at work, convenient, but also a distraction and an isolation device (since we don’t talk to people in public places as much). But for the traveler, the smartphone lightens our luggage by 20 lbs. or more (leave out the books) and enables facts and history to be looked up whenever curiosity motivates us. I would read a sign in an ancient garden in China, for example, and then learn more about something described on the sign via my phone and the $10/day in Verizon roaming fees.
Why not put on the VR goggles and travel from the air-conditioned comfort of one’s living room?
There is a widespread belief among people who do not travel that it is not necessary to actually visit other countries because one can get a good sense of them by watching travel programs, leafing through magazines, or reading travel-inspired books. A new species of “armchair-travelers” who sit in front of their television sets watching travel documentaries has emerged in the last decades. This suggests that it is possible to travel without departing from one’s home! The underlying presupposition is that travel is seeing places, and that instead of actually going to places one may bring them into one’s living room. This mistaken view has to be firmly debunked. The relationship between taking a cruise along the Li River in China and experiencing the otherworldly landscape of the Guilin karsts enveloping the boat – full of fellow Chinese travelers – and the watching of a film about Guilin is akin to the relationship between seeing a photo of a person you love and having the actual person next to you. The visual portrayal of a place, whether it be a photo or a movie, as well as any verbal description of it, are incommensurable with the immersive living experience. There is no comparison between Guilin-the-photo and Guilin-the-place-and-experience. Another analogy is comparing the photo of a French cheese platter with eating the real cheeses. One is dead, the other alive. The real cheeses have a wealth of smells, textures, and tastes; the photo is a mere representation. Often, modern man lives in his mind and forgets that Guilin is a real place situated in a three-dimensional universe with a sky above it, a real river running through it, and surrounding rice fields with farmers tending them. No digital reproduction or literary description, however good or poetic, can replace the feeling of a breeze on one’s face or the little droplets from the river’s spray. At best, any description is a pointer to what one may experience if one gets off the couch and sets out to discover the actual place.
He divides up travel into four possible categories. A “one-dimensional” trip is taking an organized tour or flying out to see a new city’s main sights. A “two-dimensional” trip seems to be the same thing, more or less, but a bit longer, e.g., two weeks on a fixed itinerary. Real travel begins with three-dimensional trips of at least three weeks and without prearranging hotels beyond the first few nights. The ultimate:
The four-dimensional journey is much longer in duration and usually involves more than one country. This is travel with infinite degrees of freedom. It opens up a whole new universe of sights, sounds, smells, but also new ways of seeing the world and of understanding mankind in general and oneself in particular.
Examples of total travel are a nine-month journey around Latin America or a six-month journey in West Africa, where one will basically be on one’s own and discover his way around as he moves.
Traveling around the world is a special case of four-dimensional travel. It is the most ambitious and all-encompassing type of travel and belongs to a category of its own. The whole of life becomes the field of exploration of the world-traveler.
Who among us can take off months or years to do this, though? Plainly the young can do it, backpacking among cheap hostels. The author says that this is suboptimal because (a) the traveler lacks sufficient life experience, and (b) going cheap means the traveler misses out on a lot of the social environments of each country. He suggests that a person should be at least 35 years old to fully appreciate a round-the-world four-dimensional journey.
What about those of us who have to love Royal Caribbean and its organized shore excursions (thanks, Mom!)?
Yet, out of fear of the unknown, a large part of the world’s population never travels. At its heart is the fear that one’s needs will not be taken care of, that one will wander alone and helpless in the world. That is why the majority of those who travel choose to do so in a manner that allows them to feel as though they have never left their comfort zones. The majority of travelers who choose to join group tours do so not just to save money but also to feel safe and secure and to have the certainty that nothing will go wrong. Behind modern mass tourism lies an unexpressed fear of the unknown. A second fear is that of not being in control. The modern travel agency or tour operator solves both: It makes the unknown seem known by showing photos of the places to be visited, and it deals with the fear of the traveler not being in control by offering its own control over the way one will travel – it provides fixed itineraries and detailed schedules. The traveler therefore buys the illusion of both security and control over his journey by relinquishing his freedom. However, by doing so, he paradoxically turns the journey into something that is beyond his control, since everything has already been planned by others.
After talking down the organized tour, a few pages later the author describes his experience as an independent traveler:
I had already been cheated many times across the whole spectrum of my dealings with the Vietnamese. Taxi drivers, hotel managers, and fruit sellers were overcharging me at every possible opportunity. Being an experienced traveler, I was amazed at how I was being exploited like a novice every time I slightly dropped my guard. All the daily little robberies, exploitations, and occasional bullying by the Vietnamese are effective because the majority of tourists allow it. Visitors come to Vietnam to have a good time, and they don’t want to constantly argue about the price of everything.
Maybe there is some value in letting the tour operator do all of the commercial negotiation in advance!
He discovers that what’s off the beaten path is sometimes beating…
To take another example, on the way to explore the Hamar tribe in Ethiopia’s South Omo Valley, we may come upon a market at which locals invite us to witness the young men’s rite of passage featuring ritual whipping, by which young men prove their manly abilities and are permitted to claim a wife and start a family. We end up in the forest witnessing a few handsome teenagers whipping female family members on their backs until they bleed. It is easy to rush into premature conclusions and think that this behavior is the product of a violent male-dominated society. Yet if we defer judgment and are attentive, we will observe that the women are actually willing participants and persistently demand that they be whipped! Rather than judging, we may seek to better understand the situation by unabashedly asking the locals to enlighten us, and by reading about the custom later. As it turns out, the custom serves a deeper purpose: that of strengthening familial bonds and of initiating young men and women into adulthood.
He learns that, even in countries not run by Donald Trump, citizens believe their own country to be “great”:
… many people in many different countries think that they live in the best country in the world. It was always enlightening to hear the rational arguments these people invented in order to support their already-formed ideas and prejudices. It never crosses their minds that they have been brainwashed by family or school into thinking that their country is the best. Nor do they consider that because they grew up adapting to the environmental and cultural specifics of their own country, they ended up turning these into the weights and measures of evaluating all other cultures. Nor does it occur to them that they came to love those specific elements in their culture that they themselves had acquired, and thus their love for their own culture is in great part another expression of self-love! … If you don’t believe me that your country is neither the most beautiful nor the best in the world, then visit France. And if you are French, stay put!
What about loneliness? The author adopts an attitude that the traveler is not alone because “He is almost always surrounded by people, be they locals, other travelers, or passersby.” and that it is possible to communicate with these people primarily nonverbally. He suggests getting into a mindset in which it doesn’t matter that specific people aren’t there and not trying to photograph and share the experience with the folks back home.
The people you love are not a fixed, unalterable set! We would dare say, they should not be a fixed set. Friendships are created through a conscious mutual effort that involves openness to the unknown person and a movement towards him. There was a moment in time when each of your current friends was not a friend. At some point, even your spouse was as unknown to you as every person you meet in your travels. Every friend you have ever had was as much a stranger to you as this old Papuan man you have just met, who sleeps in a thatched hut with his pig. Yet if you would start talking to him with openness and an earnest desire to come to know him, you would soon discover that not only is he an extraordinary person but that, in spite of your age difference, your different cultures and upbringing, you could become friends. Before you know it, you would realize that you have made a new friend, Papete. You would know that you will remain in the heart of one another for the rest of your lives, even if you never meet again.
I’m going to Bermuda January 10-13. Weather supposedly typically involves a high temp of around 70 degrees, perfect for walking around the downtown area. Who wants to join? I don’t have a schedule there, just making an exploratory foray to decide if we should organize a trip there with the kids (requires military-style planning).
The other option is a Silk Road trip organized by the MIT Alumni folks (but you don’t need an MIT connection to sign up). It is April 27-May 14, 2020. It is a soft and easy way to see five “Stan” countries that are challenging to visit independently. I think that there are still a few spots left (max group size: 21). From the web site:
Explore four different UNESCO World Heritage sites, including the fabled Uzbek oases of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and Turkmenistan’s Parthian Kingdom of Nisa. In Penjikent, Tajikistan, explore the ruins of the 5th century AD trade center, Shakristan. Wander through colorful bazaars and step into the past on the streets of Silk Road trade centers crowned with complex Persian architecture. Along the way, meet with local experts and artisans, attend an engaging performance of the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas, and visit a traditional Kazakh falcon farm.
I’m going solo since (a) our kids will be in school, (b) senior management will not abandon our children for that long, and (c) most of my friends are stuck working or teaching. (Our ground school class at MIT is over in January and I’m done with the data science class at Harvard Medical School by the end of March.)
One of our pilot friends spent a whole year in Turkmenistan teaching mathematics at an American high school. She loved it! During a trip to Moscow, I learned that Uzbeki food is a staple for Muscovites, in the same way that Mexican food is popular among Americans.
It is easy and inexpensive to get to these places on Turkish Airlines (even from Silicon Valley) or Emirates.
This is based on a recent Boston-Shanghai nonstop round-trip, about 14 hours each way on a Boeing 787.
Airfare was only $650 round-trip, including up to two checked bags, a sign of the lack of demand in November (probably the ideal time for a tourist visit to Shanghai due to moderate weather and minimal rain), and the plane turned out to be only 2/3rds full. (incredibly boring video, intended for toddlers, of the plane pulling in to park)
Hainan has a higher staff-to-passenger ratio at the check-in counters. Even though I arrived right at the magic 2-hour-prior peak moment, the typical 45-minute line to check in was absent. A helpful Chinese woman whose English was good checked me in and had me on my way to security within a few minutes of arriving at the curb.
Massport invested heavily in signs promoting free WiFi at Logan:
… and then did the usual American-quality job of provisioning to ISDN speeds:
(See below for how this is 1/100th the speed of WiFi at Shanghai Pudong Airport.)
Thanks to the plane being only 2/3rds full, boarding was a lot faster than less stressful than a typical JetBlue or United attempt to board a narrow-body plane with fewer passengers.
The ordinary economy-class seats are arranged as 3-3-3 and have a reasonable amount of legroom (I’m 6′ tall) and a reasonable recline. I had a whole row of three seats to myself (“poor man’s business class”). Even if the plane had been full, though, it would have been vastly better than sitting in coach on a U.S. carrier. More than 90 percent of the customers are Chinese, so the probability of sitting next to a tall obese person would have been low and, as mentioned above, the legroom is at least as good as on JetBlue and much better than what the typical U.S. carrier provides in coach. Chinese kids are generally cheerful, so the chance of being near a screaming child is also lower than on a carrier catering to Western customers.
The flight attendants begin the flight by standing solemnly near the front of each section and introducing themselves as a group, thanking passengers for entrusting them with this voyage, and expressing the hope that their service will bring us pleasure. They then bow to all of the passengers. All of the flight attendants appeared to be women in their 20s or 30s, elegantly attired in a Chinese-patterned dress. In other words, the people on both flights actually matched the flight attendants you might see in an ad for the airline. From a Hainan web page describing the uniforms designed by Laurence-Xu and introduced in 2017:
From the same web page:
At the same time as our introduction of the Rosy Clouds uniform line, Hainan Airlines has consulted with renowned make-up artist Mao Geping to create a new look that is both simple and sophisticated. This new style is fresh and clean, enhancing the natural beauty that is already there rather than garishly painting over it. The sandy color of the women’s lipstick echoes the colors of the cabin interior. The pearlescent eye shadow not only matches the blue and grays of the uniform but also the fabric on the seats. Our beautiful new uniforms paired with the elegant women who wear them creates a new professional image of the Hainan Airlines flight attendants.
Service is much more soft-spoken and elegant than in the U.S. They do use carts for serving meals from trays, but otherwise everything is done with trays including trash collection. Apparently a Chinese customer does not want to see a flight attendant carrying a trash bag down the aisle. Every passenger is provided with a kit containing a sleep mask, ear plugs, toothbrush and toothpaste, and travel socks. Headphones are offered at no charge.
The plane was configured to deliver WiFi Internet, but the service was not available on our flight. I am not sure how it would have worked given a route that goes over Greenland, Svalbard, and Siberia.
Food service is calibrated to the non-obese and the sleeping: a light dinner, some self-service snacks, sandwiches starting after about 6 hours, and a medium-sized breakfast. Pitchers of green and black tea are prepared for the Chinese customers. A request for coffee yields a cup made with freeze-dried instant coffee. If you’re planning to stay up for the flight and are accustomed to the American diet, it would make sense to bring fruit, nuts, carrot sticks, and cold-brew coffee.
I was expecting the Boeing 787 to be a whole new world of comfort and quiet and the noise control for a composite fuselage does seem impressive. However, the net result does not seem dramatically quieter than the front portion of a Boeing 737, for example (I neglected to bring my sound level meter, and the iOS ones are junk). Cabin pressure at 33,000′ was 4,650′ according to ForeFlight (3.8 psi versus 12.4 psi, for a differential of 8.6 (compare to 7.8 max differential on a Boeing 737, so I am not sure what all of the fuss is about)). Walking up and down the aisle it is plain that there is a “extra noise zone” near the back of the wing and therefore the engine exhaust. Try to avoid a seat around row 46. Seats farther back were actually quieter.
Seatback entertainment offers at least 100 movies and an awesome “3D Airshow” from Panasonic Avionics, much better than anything I have experienced on a U.S. or European carrier (video of the system’s animation of our route). There are power outlets (compatible with U.S. plugs as well as European) and USB A outlets for all of the economy seats.
I had thought that the weather over the Arctic tended to be smooth, but we hit some turbulence over Greenland at 33,000′ and experienced at least a few bumps for about 1 hour out of 12+. Everything in China was kept a bit warmer than in the U.S. and the Boeing 787 was no exception. I was comfortable in a T-shirt and jeans, but consider packing shorts to change into during the flight.
Arrival in Shanghai involves escalators, hallways, and a train. The distances seem vast, on the same scale as Heathrow, but everything is new and shiny. We arrived at what would have seemed like a busy time, around 6 pm on a weekday, but clearing immigration required waiting behind just one other person and took just a couple of minutes. Unlike in the U.S., the folks who check passports and suitcases are not armed. In fact, I did not see anyone in the Shanghai airport with a gun.
Apple Maps showed that the quickest way to central Shanghai was simply a taxi ($30 for a 45-minute drive despite the evening rush hour; note prices posted above baggage carousel), but I wanted to try the maglev (a fairly long walk from Terminal 2). If you’re on a budget, just take the Metro anywhere in the city straight from the airport for less than $1. That adds about 15 minutes compared to the maglev.
The return journey was equally smooth. My hotel was not right at a Metro station so I just jumped in a taxi for a 40-minute Sunday morning ride. Again arriving exactly two hours before the flight, I went from curb to bag check to passport control to the completion of security in about 10 minutes. China is a bit like Turkey in that passengers who can afford air travel are treated by the airport staff, even those involved with security, with a certain amount of deference and respect. As with the arrival, I did not see anyone carrying a gun. WiFi is fast, but the Great Firewall won’t let you reach Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia so you may end up sticking with roaming LTE (there does not seem to be any restriction on what can be accessed when roaming from a foreign country).
If you’re going to the G gates, accessible via train, keep in mind that there is more variety in shopping and food in the main D section of Terminal 2, i.e., before you get on the in-airport train. Most of the souvenirs that you’d want to buy, including fine silks and hand-made fans, are available at the airport and at roughly the same price as at a nice shop in the city.
Some items to note from the photos below: “Taiwan” is classified as something other than an “International” departure; the bathroom signage is pretty clear on what a “man”, “woman”, and “family” might look like. There are no “all-gender” restrooms. Starbucks and Burger King are available. See if you can find the special lounge for PHP programmers:
The flight back was just as good, but smoother and a bit longer. Again I had three seats to myself. The route stuck closer to the north coast of Alaska and took me back to Gjoa Haven and the heart of the Northwest Passage.
Since it had been around 70 degrees and dry every day in China I hadn’t bothered to check the weather for Boston. It turned out to be low IFR with a heavy rain cell right over Logan Airport during our scheduled arrival time. We were vectored around a bit and then, contrary to Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant theories, the Hainan crew did a perfect smooth landing. I checked the METAR:
That’s wind from the northeast (020) at 25 knots gusting 37 with 3/4 statute miles of visibility (everything else in aviation is generally nautical miles). Compare to 1/2 miles of visibility as the minimum for the standard instrument approach to Runway 4R at Boston. Runway visual range (“RVR”) was as low as 2000′, variable up to 5500′. Compare to 1200′ RVR as the minimum for a CAT II ILS 4R at Logan. There was heavy rain and a broken ceiling of clouds at 900′ above the surface (compare to 200′ for the minimum on an ordinary ILS approach to 4R). Temperature 8C, dewpoint 6C.
For the non-Global Entry masses, the immigration lines were epic. Back in the Land of Freedom (TM), there were close to 100 government agents carrying guns in the immigration and customs area. The sluggishness of clearing people through immigration meant that baggage piled up on the carousel (passengers not having emerged in time to claim it). I saw more obese people in the 10 minutes after landing than during 10 days in China.
The good news for U.S. airlines is that it would be illegal for Hainan to operate U.S. domestic routes! Certainly this would be a preferred choice for an American consumer.
(Note that if you take Hainan to Shanghai and then need to connect to a flight from the second airport on the other side of the city need to connect across airports in Shanghai, there is a direct Metro line (2) that does this for $1. This should never be necessary since both airports are international and serve most destinations, but it would not be inconvenient or expensive.)
JetBlue was honoring Justin Trudeau on the way out (September) …
Nobody who arrives at the Denver Airport in the late evening is going to get claustrophobia:
My experience at the Maven at Dairy Block Hotel proves that nobody older than 40 should attempt to stay at a hip hotel. Although it was Sunday and Monday night when I stayed, there was already a lot of noise from the outdoor dining tables in the alley underneath the room. Airstream and pinball in the lobby:
I did appreciate the room numbers done in nails. Instead of a vat of coffee in the lobby from which you pour yourself as many cups as you want (Hampton Inn-style), you take a coupon for a precious single cup of single vintage drip coffee served by a tattooed and pierced cashier at the artisanal coffee shop within the building:
There is an upscale food court attached to the hotel. If nothing else, it proves an example of the critical difference between possessive and contraction.
We were working near Union Station:
This area certainly won’t win prizes for affordability. We didn’t see a sandwich for less than $13. A haircut from a barber shop, with tip, was $40. The first native-born Uber driver that I met was during the departure ride to the airport (20-minute traffic jam delay at 8 pm). He said “I’ve lived here my whole life, but I can’t afford it anymore. It is like San Francisco. I think I’ll have to move.” Certainly he can be replaced. The sandwich shops were staffed mostly by non-English-speaking immigrants who were receiving instruction in such basic tasks as ladling soup into disposable bowls.
Dinner was a $70 plate of tacos at Tamayo:
After we managed to eat most of these, our local friend gave us a tour of the 16th Street Mall. She knew many of the homeless people we encountered, whose environment was punctuated by video signboards advertising Patagonia, purveyor of $200 down vests. Instead of the garments, however, Patagonia was advertising its brand with a message about climate change:
The good news is that nobody over age 30 is “facing extinction,” according to Patagonia.
(Wouldn’t the actual “climate deniers” be Patagonia customers themselves? Suppose that someone bought a vest for $30 at Costco or $40 at Uniqlo instead of paying $200 for a Patagonia vest. He/she/ze would then have $160-170 left over with which to plant trees ($1/tree in bulk?) to reduce global warming. What is better evidence of climate denial than conspicuous consumption of luxury goods such as Patagonia clothing?)
The Denver Art Museum is mostly closed for a massive renovation. But there is still some great stuff on display. Kids were better dressed in the old days:
I love Nam June Paik’s work, but how can it be maintained? Who has a stock of late 20th century Trinitron tubes?
I thought it would kill on Facebook to write “A big space needs a lot of rooftop A/C.” over a picture of these Donald Judd sculptures.
How wrong I was!
A professional fundraiser was outside seeking donations for bringing more migrants to the U.S. I gave him my standard offer of paying for transportation and food if he wanted to house a migrant in his own apartment. This was refused: “That’s not how we work.”
Inside the museum, an Erika Harrsch installation/video promoting migration:
More exciting for the kids: a 1970 hall of mirrors by Lucas Samaras. The renovated museum will be open in 2022, just in time for Shanghai to have built another Manhattan full of office space.
What do people read in Denver? I visited the Tattered Cover, an old-school downtown bookstore, to find out. “For the sisters, misters, and binary resisters”:
(Will the Mueller Report have to be shredded now that Trump is being impeached from his position as Fuhrer due to Ukraine, not Russia? Or will people still pay to read this in hardcopy? And I would hope that the one thing anyone can learn during National Hispanic Heritage Month is that nobody could ever have too many tamales!)
Denver got quite a bit younger and hipper as I made my way back to the airport. The airport is ready for the Elizabeth Warren presidency. JetBlue, regrettable, is showing movies by a convicted (in New Yorker magazine and on Facebook) rapist. To deceive the woke/outraged into watching Annie Hall, the airline tags it as dating to 2007 (Wikipedia says 1977).
Due to the easy flight connections to Asia and the appeal to the young workers that employers seek, I cling to my belief that Denver was the best choice for Amazon HQ2. At the same time, it seems that any more business growth will be very tough indeed on the lower skill members of the community.
My favorite pictures from the trip are of an app-linked electric scooter tossed into the garbage in front of a micro-brewery. I posted this to Facebook with “Public service announcement: eating avocado toast and steering don’t mix.”
This is a review of the MS Roald Amundsen based on a three-week Northwest Passage cruise in 2019.
photo: Karsten Bidstrup, one of the ship’s staff photographers
Our cruise was during the ship’s first season, so everything was in beautiful condition. Royal Caribbean, along with a lot of other cruise lines, is firmly in the “brass and glass” McMansion style of decor. The Roald Amundsen, on the other hand, is more like an architect-designed modern house (see Hurtigruten’s site for interiors of the staterooms).
The officers, nearly all of whom are Norwegian, are confidence-inspiring. Hurtigruten (“Express Route”; pronouncing the G is for amateurs) has been running up and down the coast of Norway since 1893. Getting stuck in the ice, running aground, or blundering into weather that cannot be managed does not seem likely. The ship seemed quite stable, but we did not hit any significant wind or waves during our voyage so it is tough to say how it will handle the Drake Passage.
How about the people? Whom will you be with for several weeks in remote corners of the planet? Guests were of the same composition as in an American suburb in which people constantly express their passion for diversity, inclusion, and social justice. I.e., 100% white European and Asian. Out of 472 passengers, just 22 were American. The most common places of origin were Germany (157), UK (136), and Scandinavia (83 plus 2 Finns). [Europeans have some shocking views on current events!] Median age was around 65. A Danish couple brought their 13- and 15-year-old sons.
Weight control will be an issue on the ship. Despite severe challenges of resupply in the Canadian Arctic, the French chef Julien Screve managed to create tempting cuisine far above the Royal Caribbean standard. He was assisted by a pastry chef who made bread comparable to what you’d get in a European neighborhood bakery. Screve and the restaurant manager Nicolas Longin raided a supermarket to get the ingredients for poutine after I said that no trip to Canada could be considered complete without poutine. Real maple syrup is served with breakfast. Unlike on a typical cruise line, there is essentially no food available except during the set meal times.
Department of High Praise: One passenger is a regular speaker on Cunard’s Queen Mary. He said that Julien’s creations in the high Arctic using ingredients sourced in Iceland and Greenland were comparable in quality, if not variety, to what is served on Cunard.
Although the ship is sizable, it is not spacious enough that you can easily burn off calories by walking. The top deck is supposedly where the walking will happen, and it has bars for “outdoor gym” exercises that a fit 22-year-old might be able to accomplish, but the ship tends to go through some pretty cold regions and it is only 460′ long, about half the length of an ordinary cruise ship. The gym is small, windowless, and often a bit crowded (the Royal Caribbean Serenade of the Seas, by contrast, had a huge usually-empty gym with windows all around the bow from the 11th floor).
There is a pool, but it is tiny and does not have an artificial current. There are two outdoor hot tubs, but both are kept at 37C, about 2 degrees cooler than what an American would call “hot”. The sauna, on the other hand, is hotter than what an American health club would set.
How to keep busy when cruising through the high Arctic? Internet was not an option. It worked for about half of the days of our trip and the definition of “work” was 20-50 kbits/second. The only applications that were usable were data-based text messaging services, such as iMessage and WhatsApp. Everything else seems to assume that you have at least 1 Mbit of connectivity and a lot of patience.
The ship carried a lot of lecturers with a rich knowledge of biology, ecology, geology, and anthropology. However, the lack of a nightly Broadway-style show (who wants to hear “New York, New York” again?) means that the ship has no theater. No theater for a nightly Broadway show also means no comfy theater for daytime lectures (on Royal Caribbean, the theater chairs are larger and more comfortable than anything we have in our house).
What does the Roald Amundsen have to support lectures? A classroom. It is nowhere near big enough for half the passengers, even with narrow hard chairs sized and spaced for 7th graders. The floor is flat, so anyone shorter than 6’6″ tall is unlikely to be able to see the screen if seated in the third row or beyond (I’m 6′ tall and could see about half the screen, typically). The guests are older and less nimble than typical 7th graders so I kept expecting someone to break a leg while trying to navigate through a row to a seat. I observed several trips and falls.
The crowding in the classroom carries over into other public spaces of the ship. It feels much more crowded than the Royal Caribbean cruises I have been on. Here’s the “Explorer Lounge” up on the top interior deck, with folks waiting for a presentation.
Passengers complained that there was often a line at the buffet and it was sometimes challenging to get coffee.
For a theoretical capacity of 530 passengers, this is a 460′ ship of 21,000 gross tons. The Crystal Endeavor is 541′ long and displaces roughly 20,000 tons… for 200 guests, but at double the nightly price. Don’t expect solitude unless you’re in your cabin!
The crew is efficient at getting people in and out of Zodiacs for landings. Nonetheless, with 500ish people on board, it takes a minimum of 3-4 hours to get everyone off the ship and back on. The time that each person can spend at a destination will be shorter than if the destination were visited in an 80-passenger ship.
The bridge is a huge working environment and remained reasonably quiet and calm even when invaded by tourists.
Hurtigruten is not great at communication. There was an update to the itinerary that the land-based staff said had been communicated by email or phone to all of the passengers. Nobody knew about it. Their online packing list says “You will receive a wind and water resistant parka“. Sounds warm, right? In fact, we got what I would call a “rain jacket”. Unlike on Royal Caribbean where you could buy an extra layer for mall-style prices, interpreting “parka” as not requiring packing a heavy fleece layer for underneath would cost at least $350. The news in the shop was not all bad though…
Passengers expressed unhappiness at the difficulty in socializing at meal times. The dining room is set up with a lot of 2- and 4-seat tables. Our Cuba cruise with Royal Caribbean was greatly enhanced by big tables and no permanently assigned seats (previous post). The good news is that, if you’re lonely, the ship has a great library of polar literature and an even greater swap shelf:
If you love technology, you’ll be dismayed at how it is used on the ship. There are no local apps or web servers for distributing information, chatting, etc. That’s a problem on a ship whose total Internet connectivity (for 500+ people) is about the same as a single 3G cell phone. How about a feed from cameras around the ship into the room TV, as is conventional on Royal Caribbean? No. The system that delivers a moving map to the in-room TVs seems to depend on connectivity to an Internet server, which we had only intermittently. Why not a self-contained system as on an airliner or traditional cruise ship? In general, it seemed as though all of the tech that the ship did have was dependent on an Internet connection that the ship seldom had.
Tips: Pay up for a balcony room. The climate control system on the ship is not very effective and if the room is too hot it is great to be able to open the balcony doors.
from Travel and Leisure magazine: “Within an hour of landing in China, there will be malware on your mobile device,” says Dave Anderson, a senior director at Voltage Security in Cupertino, Calif
Is the situation truly riskier than in the U.S.? What special tools do attackers in China have that couldn’t be deployed at a Starbucks in Peoria?
I’m not worried about someone from the Chinese government reading all of my email. Any opinions that I have about China and the Chinese government are already published here on this blog (and they’re mostly wrong! In 2003, I predicted that the Chinese would be able to make and export a basic automobile for $2,000 to $3,000 (at most $4,200 in today’s mini-dollars). As of 2016, there was a $2,400 Chinese four-seat car, but it lacks A/C and other “basics”. Today there is a $9,000 Chinese made four-door electric car.)
I wouldn’t want someone transferring money out of my online banking accounts, using my credit cards, etc., however. Given two-factor authentication with text messages to my phone, can people truly do that without having control of my mobile number?
Update: Based on Denis’s comment below, I updated the “SIM PIN” on my iPhone away from the Verizon factory default. I hope that is what he meant by “Make sure your sim is locked.”
