a glacial pace: alaska, canada & seattle travel blog

It’s that time of year again—the annual Chin Family Vacation! Suggestions welcome for a better name, because my sisters and I do not, in fact, share the last name Chin with the rest of our family.

Actually, in true blog fashion, we went on this vacation in August and I’ve only just gotten around to editing the pictures now. But I’ve been extremely busy this past month, going to bed every night quite literally exhausted, from moving apartments—unpacking, cleaning, trying to arrange my apartment in some approximation of a home. But I’ll get to that later.

After the Baltic Sea last year, our grandparents decided that we would revisit another old favorite: Alaska. We’d gone on a very similar cruise back in 2008, to almost the exact same places (of which I have some truly terrible photos of my middle school self dressed head-to-toe in Abercrombie), and the last time I’d gone to Seattle was in 2016 for spring break of my senior year of college. So I was interested to see Alaska a decade later, through the lens of climate change.

The side bangs and 2008 fashion is...oof, but my mom has literally not aged a day for a decade.

Alaska is apparently not a very popular destination for tourism, although its economy depends significantly on it. But I normally research things to do by reading travel blogs, and I was surprised to find that I couldn’t find that many (for reference, “Alaska travel blog” returns approximately 28,300,000 results while “Paris travel blog” returns around 119,000,000. “Potatoes” yields a whopping 645,000,000). Almost half of them were written by people who went on the exact same or a cruise similar to the one we went on. Which I suppose makes sense, given that Juneau is the only U.S. capital that requires a boat to reach it. But it was still striking, having only a couple of travel blogs and my memories as a 14-year-old from which to form my expectations.

One thing I do remember is that it was beautiful, and that has remained true.

day 1: seattle, washington

We board the Ovation of the Seas in Seattle, and already I’m impressed. It looks different than any other ship we’ve been on before—for starters, it’s massive. There are supposed to be almost 5,000 passengers on this boat, which is absolutely mind-blowing. I still don’t fully understand the physics of how a ship can still float with that many people and multiple swimming pools. But this one is beautiful.

I think the last time I was this in awe of a ship was back in 2009 when we sailed on the Carnival Freedom, but that one felt ostentatious in comparison. This one looks like it could be a gorgeous hotel—all white marble tile, glass staircases, and wooden columns. There’s an indoor mall promenade that looks as if it belongs in San Diego’s luxe new La Jolla complex, and a Bionic Bar upstairs served by a couple of robot arms making drinks à la carte.

Our first order of business as a family, as always, is to meet on the highest deck at the buffet for a late lunch after all 22 of us have checked in. We’re all amazed by the smallest things, like the hand-washing stations at the entrance to the buffet instead of the ineffective (and always rather gross) plastic hand sanitizer dispensers that are normally ubiquitous on every ship.

“Washy washy,” the attendant instructs us, and this becomes an inside joke among 5,000 people for the rest of the cruise.

After lunch, my younger cousins are excited to explore the upper decks (they’re particularly fascinated by the Flowrider, a wave pool that you can boogie board and wakeboard on, and the SeaPlex, a giant basketball court that doubles as a dodgeball court, roller skating rink, and bumper car arena. There are little pods upstairs that hold giant TVs and cushy chairs for people to play video games, an arcade, and an indoor hot dog stand. My family immediately signs up for the indoor skydiving, something I’ve wanted to do forever and also something I’m very much looking forward to my watching my mom and all of her brothers try.

And then it’s already time for dinner, at a restaurant called Chic that looks like a very modern restaurant that wouldn’t be out of place in downtown LA or New York. We meet our waiters, Lavinia and Miguel; the kids are instantly infatuated with the latter, who is a young guy maybe my age and serves them lemonade instead of water. He clearly has no idea what he’s getting himself into—it’s almost always a contest among the kids to see who can order the most at dinner. The record is 14 plates in one meal (my 15-year-old cousin, Jared).

After dinner, we go liquor tasting because it’s free, about 15 of us crammed into the little liquor shop, and the very kind host takes shots with us. These vacations always turn my family into alcoholics, but I swear that even beer at dinner is a rare occurrence back home. The vacation Chins/Changs are the fun ones, clearly.

On a whim, my mom buys a little pocket Sudoku pack, with three little booklets of hundreds of puzzles arranged according to difficulty: easy, medium, and hard (little do we know that these booklets will be the bane of our existences by the end of this cruise). We try a Sudoku challenge out of the “easy” booklet, because my family is extremely competitive—we each get one page out of the booklet and see who can finish it first. It turns out to be way more difficult than we expect, and none of us end up finishing them before our next activity: trivia (of course).

It’s in a little English pub on the ground floor and it’s live music trivia, which means that it’s just two guys on guitar and drums playing the songs and we have to guess them. We get 23 total right, mostly thanks to Mom and Uncle Glenn. The winning team gets 30.

We end our evening with something called The 60-Second Game Show and bar karaoke, both of which are highly entertaining. It appears that people are already taking advantage of the drinks packages available on the ship and are very drunk, and even the karaoke host (completely sober) ends up launching into an impassioned rendition of Sia’s “Chandelier,” which leaves us all surprised and impressed.

I read a bit—I’m reading what every “self-respecting Brooklyn millennial” is reading, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (edit: I have some thoughts on it here), and I’m already obsessed with it—and attempt to finish my Sudoku puzzle, but eventually succumb to sleep, as it’s late in New York.

day 2: at sea, alaska inside passage

We wake up slowly and lazily; there’s a “window” in our cabin, a large digital screen framed by curtains that plays footage from a camera placed on the top of the ship in real-time. It keeps glitching and turning green, though, much to our amusement.

We watch the kids do the Flowrider on the upper deck. They start out on boogie boards, and then graduate to what looks like a skimboard, which is much more difficult because it requires a lot of balance, all while you’re battling against the artificial current, which is so strong that it swoops the kids in one powerful motion all the way to wall at the back of the pool when they wipe out.

It’s quite surreal to watch people surfing on the deck of a large ship as it skims through cerulean water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We explore the ship a little bit, quickly finding our favorite spots—the Schooner Bar that holds trivia every night, the Music Hall where we saw the 60-Second Game Show and where bands play live music at all hours, Two70 (a large lounge with a dance floor and a bar that the staff seems very eager to promote), and the café and pizzeria right next to each other on the indoor promenade where we can have unlimited pizza and cake and hot chocolate.

Our next activity is an afternoon scavenger hunt, which involves us running around the entire ship attempting to hunt down random bits of information like, “How many butterflies are in the digital art exhibit,” “what color is the helipad on the top deck,” and, “What is the name of the Scottish guy at the pool.” The latter turns out to be Graham, the karaoke guy who sang “Chandelier” at an impressive octave and volume.

We get second place in the scavenger hunt and walk away with some pretty sweet zipper pulls, which are actually much more enticing than the first place medals, since we can actually use them. Note to self: bring walkie-talkies next time to aid in communication as cell phone service at sea is unreliable at best.

We do dinner and a ‘70s dance party in Two70, complete with disco jumpsuits, flashing rings, afro wigs, and an appearance by “the Village People.” I forgot how fun themed nights are (and how much I like disco). But I also think they would be more fun if guests were notified in advance about what the themes were going to be, and could pack accordingly. Had I known, I would have worn my sparkliest eyeshadow.

day 3: juneau, alaska

We wake up to the ship pulling into Juneau, Alaska. It’s an incredible sight, to watch this enormous cruise ship cutting through perfectly blue water, surrounded by mountains blanketed in thousands of velvety little evergreen trees, and parallel-parking neatly between the dock and another, smaller cruise ship.

It’s chillier than I anticipated. I’d vividly remembered baking in the hot Alaskan sun even while we stood next to a glacier, so this time around, I packed only short-sleeved shirts and my favorite Patagonia fleece. I can see now that this was a mistake. Thank god for the Patagonia.

Our family had booked a tour of the Macaulay Salmon Hatchery, so that’s where we go first. At first, it looks unassuming: a small tin building with low-slung red rooftops, a salmon ladder to mimic the salmon’s natural habitat, and a floating structure a little ways out to sea. But once we get closer, we see that the real treasure is swimming the pens—thousands of slippery salmon all milling around each other in the inky water. In the lobby, there’s a large, cylindrical aquarium and touch tanks with brittle sea stars and soft sea cucumbers. I always enjoy sea cucumbers. They’re just the strangest little animals.

I’d assumed that hatcheries and farms were the same thing, but they’re not—as our guide explained, farmed salmon are born and harvested on the same farm, but hatcheries spawn salmon with the sole purpose of releasing them into the wild. They’re nonprofits with the goal of enhancing the natural salmon population; they breed them, let them go, and the salmon eventually find their way back to the hatchery to breed. Apparently, salmon have an acute sense of smell, and that’s how they find their birth places. The floating “pens” in the open water are to simultaneously acclimate them to ocean water and to the scent of their hatchery so they can find it later.

This hatchery endeavors to breed 100 million salmon a year, but only 1-10% survive. After salmon hatch out of their eggs, they carry around and live off their egg sacs, like little bellies. They can spend anywhere from six months to a year and a half in their freshwater rearing phase, like an incubator. We enter a large metal barn with a long concrete path suspended above a bunch of empty tanks. At least I think they’re empty, until I realize that the tiny little black dots floating in the tanks are the salmon. It looks like there are millions of them; they move like flocks of birds do, in synchronized waves that tumble around the tank in a fluid motion, but when you watch them individually, they’re moving quickly, frenetically, darting around one another.

I go outside to watch salmon at the salmon ladder, but there aren’t that many of them. But suddenly—a seal appears! He’s quick, diving gracefully in and out of the pools of the salmon ladder, grabbing fish in his mouth as they leap out of the water to avoid him, and then disappearing under the water again. You can see him chasing the salmon around the pools and then launching himself out again to the next pool in the ladder. It’s objectively funny, watching him hurl his chubby little body out of the water so gracefully. The guide says seals are a common occurrence. I think he’s quite smart; the salmon are essentially sitting ducks (or maybe...fish in a barrel?) and it makes for a rather low-effort meal.

Afterward, we drive to the Mendenhall Glacier, which was something we did back in 2008. In fact, Aunty Sonia recently emailed our family that she’d uploaded pictures from our past family vacations to a cloud drive, which she shared with us, so I have a photographic comparison of what the glacier looked like a decade ago and what it looks like now.

It’s still beautiful, but I remember the sheer magnitude of it back in 2008 (and even that was a significant retreat from 1894), and now it looks so much smaller, which is really sad. It’s especially heartbreaking because Alaska is pretty well-preserved—there’s limited encroaching developments and gentrification—but global warming has simply melted much of it. I really don’t understand how you can possibly deny climate change when you can plainly see its effects (looking at you, Sarah Palin, and no, I’m not linking any sources because she doesn’t deserve our attention). I used to give people the benefit of the doubt—oh, maybe climate change deniers aren’t actually stupid and evil; I’m just so privileged to have traveled that I can see climate change firsthand!—but now I don’t think it’s as harmless as a lack of education; it’s willful ignorance and straight-up greed as a means of self-preservation. And that is stupid and evil.

We all decide to go to Nugget Falls, which is a only a 1.5 mile walk there and back; a nice, easy walk shaded by trees. Our grandparents go to the visitor’s center instead, and the remaining 20 of us head for the waterfall.

When we finally reach the pebbly shore, I feel that same thrilling sense of joy, the one I felt standing under the waterfalls in Costa Rica. It’s absurd, to feel the same thing in two entirely opposite places. But something about waterfalls makes you feel so small—the relentless pounding of the water, the rocks towering miles above you. You feel completely at their mercy. We’re standing far from where the water is falling at the base, but we can still feel the icy spray of it on our faces. We admire the endless sky, the painted sunset reaching across it. We’re all freezing, but we all acknowledge that this is something we may never see again in our lifetimes, and it’s worth it.

Afterward, we all go to Fred Meyer, which my uncle describes to me as “kind of like a Walmart,” but I’ve never heard of before. Apparently they’re only in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska. It is indeed like a Walmart, but we’re immediately enamored with the Alaskan souvenirs—ceramic mugs painted with moose tracks, tea towels with leaping salmon, cute knit gloves and mittens with little polar bears stitched onto them. We all spread out, trying to find snacks that we wouldn’t be able to find at home. We’ve been on the hunt for salmon jerky since we docked here, but we haven’t found any. Interestingly, there is no salmon jerky (I assume this is a touristy thing), but there are some unusual variations of snacks, like weirdly-shaped Cheetos. I’m always interested as to why they make things like that, because it’s not catering to local tastes or anything. What about Alaskans made Frito-Lay say, “We need different shapes specifically for them.”

We make it back to the ship just in time for dinner, trivia, and live music.

day 4: skagway, alaska

We’re up at 6 am to catch a train, specifically the White Pass & Yukon Railroad summit excursion—a 40-mile train trip from the little town of Skagway all the way to the summit of the White Pass at the border of Alaska and Canada (an elevation of 2,888 feet). Construction of the railroad finished in the year 1900, a product of the Klondike Gold Rush that took tens of thousands of gold-crazed miners through 600 miles of dangerous trails from Skagway to the Klondike.

One of my most vivid memories from our 2008 trip is actually of this train ride, of me and my cousin Emmy standing on the platforms in between the train cars, our faces turned toward the sun and whipped by the chilly wind, and “Flight of the Order of the Phoenix” on our iPods. If you closed your eyes, it felt like you were flying.

It’s very cold today, much colder than I remember it, and I can only be outside for half an hour at a time with my camera before my fingers begin to numb and the frigid air has seeped through my fleece jacket. It’s mostly just me and Uncle Glenn outside, because we both like photography (although he’s much more invested in it than I am, and actually carried his big DSLR and telephoto lens all the way from New York), and one guy who is very focused on getting footage on his GoPro.

But it’s so beautiful. The air is crisp and cool; it feels as though it’s opening your lungs with each icy breath. I’m always reminded of this one quote from Mark Twain that I used for a project back in junior year of high school: “The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?—it is the same the angels breathe.” It made the outdoors sound so appealing.

We pass snow-capped mountains, plushy evergreen trees, and rocky gorges with ice-blue water tumbling through them. Everything looks like a postcard, and as the train makes its way up the rickety wooden tracks, we can see clear across to the ocean and the misty mountains the backdrop.

After we return to Skagway, we go shopping in the little downtown area. Everyone is marveling over the gemstones in the window of a jewelry store, twinkling sapphires and emeralds and chocolate-colored diamonds, but my sisters and I wander away, lured by the smell of kettle corn.

Skagway is a tiny, tiny town. Even to call it a city feels like a misnomer (Wikipedia refers to it as, and I quote, “a compact city”). As of 2018, it only had 1,150 residents. And it feels that way, because almost everyone we encounter as a tourist. The town itself feels unreal, almost like a reconstruction at Disneyland or Universal Studios, and equally charming. You can see traces of its Klondike Gold Rush days, the hotels and saloons and general storefronts with pastel-colored wooden slats with hand-painted lettering. The Wells Fargo is from 1916 and it’s the only one in town. From Lonely Planet:

This bank dates back to 1916 (although it looks newer) when a group of East Coast businessmen founded the National Bank of Alaska, and built this bank a year later. Today it is an interesting place to visit even if you’re not short on cash. Two of the five brass teller gates are originals, there are spittoons in case you’re chewing tobacco, and on display everywhere are banking artifacts, from a classic ‘Cannonball’ safe to an old coin machine.

I note with delight that the streets are named things like “Spring Street,” “Broadway,” and “5th Avenue”—the same names as the streets in New York, but they look vastly different. I wonder if street names are always just borrowed from other places. I know that a lot of street names in places like LA and San Francisco are named for streets in New York, just as street names in New York are often borrowed from those in London.

The kettle corn aroma, we discover, is from Yukon Heath’s Popcorn Emporium, which makes over 25 flavors of fresh, gourmet popcorn. We sample the caramel corn and the garlic parmesan and Uncle Dave buys a bag of each. It is delicious. We also discover a place called Klondike Doughboy, which sells “dough boys,” or disks of fried dough covered in butter and cinnamon sugar. We’ve eaten a good amount for not having moved more than 10 feet.

We duck into a little museum after, which is showing a movie about the history of Skagway. It’s actually very interesting. It talks about the California Gold Rush in the 1850s, and how even though there was no gold in Alaska, the Gold Rush opened it up to tourism and settlers and essentially paved the way for the modern Alaska. Skagway itself has its own claim to fame—it was the setting of The Call of the Wild.

After that, we split up. My grandparents go back to the ship, my mom and the aunts go back into town in search of salmon jerky and a portable phone charger (the cold is making our phones lose power quickly), and the uncles take the cousins and I to the nearby creek, where our friend from the liquor shop on the ship told us we could find wild salmon.

We walk along the running water, but don’t see any. Uncle Dave and I are the most determined, so we actually climb down the banks of the river (I am in Nikes with no traction) to get a closer look. I see a solitary salmon swimming around—every so often he’ll leap out of the water to get a little bit further upstream. We decide to follow him, and we find a dead one but don’t see any in the water.

Finally, we arrive at a little lake at the end of the stream, close to the train tracks where we began our day. Nothing. We think there might be a couple of salmon in there, because we’ll see a little splash every once in a while. I try bribing them with kettle corn but apparently, salmon do not eat kettle corn. But then, Uncle Dave yells at me to look at the bottom of the lake. It’s difficult to see, but we can see little white things moving in the dark water.

“That’s their bellies,” he points out, and he’s right. There are hundreds of them, all milling around at the bottom of the lake. This is probably their nesting place, where they’re born and where they’ll eventually die. We sit, waiting, trying to get a good shot. A couple of them breach, but they’re too quick, and all of my pictures are blurry.

We head back to the ship and eat dinner, head to evening trivia, and then finish the night with ‘80s music trivia (which we kill at, thanks to our mom, our aunts, and our uncles, who were all in college in the ‘80s). There’s a particularly obnoxious woman nearby who is very rude to Marisa and I almost fight her, but she’s terrible at trivia, so I sit in smug silence instead.

day 5: endicott arm & dawes glacier, alaska

Today is essentially another sea day—we will circle the glacier in the early morning, but we’re not getting off the boat. So we wake up early to see the glacier at breakfast, because we’ll be passing by at 7:30 am. The ship glides smoothly through the glassy water, deep blue when we’re in shadow and then brilliant turquoise in the early morning sun.

We pass broken pieces of glacier scattered in the water, floating on the surface like shards of glass, and then we finally see the glacier itself. And this one is really sad. There’s a dramatic difference from when we visited in 2008—what used to be a massive wall of ice has now retreated to a small mass of blue ice nestled between the mountains.

To our delight, we spot some seals lounging on some of the smaller chunks of ice. They’re so rotund, just lounging around, completely unbothered. I aspire to that lifestyle. But our excitement quickly dissipates when we’re reminded that the reason they’re all clustered together is that there’s a shortage of icebergs for them to lounge on.

It becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the repercussions of being on a mammoth luxury cruise ship, considering the amount of waste and emissions, especially as we move on to our next activity—indoor skydiving. This was one of the most impressive features of the ship, and one we were all curious about, so as soon as we’d boarded the ship, we’d signed up. It’s just a large, upright wind tunnel, and you’re floating suspended in the middle of it. All while sailing peacefully through the Pacific Ocean.

We all suit up in full gear: squirrel suits, helmets, goggles. Our whole family is doing it, except for my grandparents. I personally can’t wait to see my mom skydive. I’m very surprised she agreed to it at all.

It’s my turn and I lean into the wind tunnel the the roar of it filling my ears. There’s a strange loss of sensation in my body; I can see the instructor occasionally touch my shoulders and my legs to turn me, but I can’t feel it. But I can feel the swooping in my stomach as I’m buffeted by the artificial wind, floating up to the top like a champagne cork. I have my arms and legs outstretched and feel very much like a flying squirrel. And then it’s over as quickly as it began, only 60 seconds long, but I feel as though I’ve been falling for eternity.

“You did very well!” our instructor says with a thumbs-up. I ask him how fast the wind was and he tells me 83 miles per hour. Remembering his demonstration—he was bouncing around the tunnel easily, lying flat on his back with his legs casually bent, diving down like a hawk and them stopping just before he hit the ground—I asked him how fast the wind was when he was doing it. 104 miles per hour. “In real life it’s a little bit faster,” he explains. I can’t possibly imagine, but I’m intrigued and I definitely want to do it for real someday.

Riding the exhilaration of skydiving, we decide to go indoor rollerskating (the amount of activities on this ship is truly endless). I actually really love rollerskating because it’s such a mellow activity—or at least that’s my impression of it until my uncle tells me that roller derby is rollerskating, and it’s probably one of the most brutal and most stressful sports in existence (with some kick-ass nicknames). But for me, it invokes the very corners of my memories; sunny Saturday afternoons when my sisters and I would tie on our clunky Skechers rollerskates with sparkly light-up wheels and skate in circles around our garage (we were not allowed to go outside, because of the danger). I remember very vaguely going to a class party in third grade at a roller rink, with ‘90s geometric-print carpeting and scuffed wooden floors and neon lights, and speeding around. Rollerskating has always been pleasantly mindless, and something I haven’t done in a very long time.

After dinner, we go to a “Finish the Lyric” gameshow and then relax in one of the lounges, listening to music. Everyone heads to the Seaplex to watch the younger kids play dodgeball, but I go back to the room because I am as high as a kite.

Some necessary backstory: Yesterday in Skagway, my uncle had mentioned he was stopping by a dispensary that we’d passed earlier and asked if I’d like to come. We walked in, I greeted the guy at the door by saying “hi,” and he instantly responded, “No, I’m not!” It took me a couple of seconds to get it and I laughed, and he explained that only about half the people get it.

Pretty soon it was me, my two uncles, my aunt, and my mom, all crammed into a little dispensary that looked more like a candy shop, with little actual weed in sight and instead displayed packages of gummies, chocolates, and candies on displays. We’d chosen a pouch of fruit punch-flavored “Glacier Gummies,” which looked innocuous enough. They were tiny little jelly squares, smaller than your pinky nail. The guy explained that they’re only 5mg each, which is half the strength of a California edible (my friend later explained that this is because Alaska weed is even stronger and therefore half would be enough, which I would’ve liked to know before I took it).

All the adults had made plans to take them today, but I think only one of my uncles and one of my aunts actually did. And also my grandparents. Earlier at dinner, my mom had come over to our table laughing hysterically, and told us that they’d all explained edibles and their effects to my grandparents, who had split a gummy, which my mom found hilarious. I later asked my grandma and she told me that it just made her feel very tired.

Now, I’m in the midst of a high, and as always, my brain goes into hyperdrive. When I’m high (which is not often), I tend to remember the reason I don’t like being high, which is that I get really paranoid and I tend to self-analyze a lot (because I’m trying to “outsmart” the high), which is exhausting. But on the plus side, this is the first non-awful experience with an edible I’ve had (I’ve only tried them twice before and both time were traumatizing).

I write down all of my thoughts, because I know I will forget, and because I like to remember how I react. Recording these things and understanding its effects is reassuring to me, because it helps me understand the way my psyche works. I have a revelation that most of my problems/insecurities can be broken down to a couple of source problems, and that they just manifest in different ways, which is something I’ve always suspected about myself.

At first I thought it was a reaction to being high, but I realized I actually do this all the time, and the high just intensifies it. I’m always trying to rationalize my feelings—some people pray when they feel lost or sad or hopeless, but my first tendency is always to dig deeper and ask myself, Why do I feel this way? And I’ve found that it’s almost never a surface-level thing. The tip of the iceberg, you might say. I’m almost positive that this has to do with OCD and fixating on things; that’s why I never find edibles relaxing, even though they make me sleepy. I think it’s my personality and the strategist in me—I overthink everything.

I only recently explained to my mom what I actually do for work. We played an icebreaker game at an office event, and one of the questions was, “Do your parents understand what you do?” and the answer for all of us was a resounding “no.” But I told my mom about strategy and what I do (another topic for another post) and she said, “That’s perfect for you.” And it really is. I’ve noticed that all the strategists I’ve ever met (or at least the good ones) all share the same kinds of characteristics, regardless of their personalities. They’re all ruthlessly curious, never satisfied by the first answer. They’re always trying to understand the way the world works from a different point of view, and making connections between unexpected things. It reminds me of a piece my friend Owen wrote about the way freestyling in jazz actually creates new pathways and frameworks in the brain, comparable to machine learning algorithms; and similarly, and how LSD can help your brain form new connections, resulting in higher creativity levels.

Which is why I don’t like being high—I start thinking about all of these things and it hurts my delicate little brain. I sleep early to quiet all of the noise in my head.

day 6: at sea

Today is our last day at sea, and we spend it lazily; we wake up late and eat a late breakfast, do some trivia, work on our Sudoku puzzles (unsuccessfully), and lounge by the windows whale-watching (we think they’re killer whales, because we can see dorsal fins). We watch the passenger talent show, which is always amusing, and stop by the Sexist Man Competition, but we only stay for five minutes because we have to make another trivia session.

My sisters and my mom go on the “North Star,” a glass capsule that’s raised above the ship. And we see more whales, frolicking off the coast!

At night, we go to the rock ‘n’ roll-themed Ovation Rocks! dance party, as we sail away into the night, leaving a trail of stars in our wake.

day 7: victoria, british columbia, canada

It’s strange being in Canada on this side of the country, when in fact New York is fairly close to Canada (an eight-hour drive from the city) and I have still never been. But Niagara is one my list. My cousin Caroline and I split off from the rest of the group and head to the nearest 7-Eleven, because I always have to go in foreign countries (even though Canada hardly feels foreign).

Everything is pretty much the same, as we expected, but they do have an assortment of interesting potato chip flavors, a machine that makes milkshakes on demand, and a lot of other strange candy that I’ve only heard of but never tried, like Wine Gums. We settle on some dill pickle-flavored Lay’s, some Sour Punch Cherries, two boxes of Nerds with flavor combinations I’ve never seen before (wild berry and peach, and tropical punch and raspberry). I mostly choose the Nerds because I’m delighted by the fact that the French translation of “tiny, tangy crunchy candy” reads as “bonbons mini-croquants piquants.” So cute.

The rest of our family joins us, 18 people all crammed into a tiny 7-Eleven, and the younger kids pick out giant multicolored Slurpees in cups bigger than their heads. And then we all gradually make our way to Chinatown.

The Chinatown here is small and quiet; it’s really only one street. We recognize the jewel-toned pagoda-style gates, with their sloping rooftops, dizzying geometric patterns, and delicate gold filigree dragons. There are a couple of restaurants signaling that they’re open with flashing neon signs and rickety “bamboo” Oriental-esque lettering, and silk lanterns hung between the buildings. The whole thing feels very constructed. I can’t picture actual Chinese people living here—it feels like a tourist destination built in an approximation of Chinese culture. Now that I think about it, it reminds me of that “Asian” restaurant on Paradise Pier at Disney’s California Adventure. Oof. That did not age well.

We grab some cha siu bao from a nearby bakery and Aunty Sonia and I sneak into a tea shop to quickly sample a scone (it was Earl Grey-flavored and it was wonderfully fragrant and delicious).

We pop into Lululemon (because they’re Canadian and therefore cheaper than in the States) and REI, just because, and then our last stop is Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a little floating district composed of colorful little buildings and fresh seafood shops. It’s very cute and quaint, with a beautiful view of the rocky, tree-studded coastline. There’s not much to see, so we just take a leisurely stroll through and then head back to the ship.

We go to dinner and then, inexplicably, live music trivia, except all the songs are performed by this Scottish guy on the bagpipes. He’s the same guy we first saw at karaoke and we literally see him at every. Single. Trivia. And also at every single dance party. We witnessed him dancing the YMCA the very first night in a sailor suit and haven’t taken him seriously since, but as it turns out, he’s quite an accomplished bagpiper(?). The trivia is actually pretty difficult, because everything just sounds like folk music when you play it on the bagpipes and he takes quite a few creative liberties. We are so close to winning, except that due to an instructional flaw, we miss points for not writing the artist names even though we know all of them.

We end the night with a silent disco, which is so much fun. It makes me regret not going to my friend’s silent disco in college—he was a DJ and was spinning at a silent disco house party. My sisters and my cousins and I all dance our hearts out, and because we are a big group we tend to create the illusion of a consensus in a room (part of the fun of silent discos is seeing what everyone else is listening to, finding the people who are having the most fun, and switching to the same channel). So when we do the dance to “Cotton Eye Joe,” everyone else copies us. The funniest part is that none of us knew the dance until just then; we’d picked it up from a random girl who was the only one in the room that appeared to know what she was doing, and by the time the chorus had come around again, we had everyone on the dance floor doing it. It was thoroughly exhausting, and it always reminds me of that that one meme.

day 8: seattle, washington

We disembark from the ship, and I’m surprised to find that I miss it already, the way I used to when I was a kid. You feel so much attachment to the ship and all the people that work on it over the course of a week, and there’s so much freedom in being able to go wherever and do whatever you want (of course, in the midst of the travesty that is the United States government, this makes me think of the irony of only feeling free and safe while contained on a floating vessel in the middle of the ocean).

We visit the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, because we’ve just heard of a new Bruce Lee exhibit that just opened up, and we’ve booked a private tour.

There are several interesting exhibits, like one called Excluded, Inside the Lines that details the struggles of Asian-Americans in Seattle when they’d first immigrated—they were systematically denied housing due to being Asian, and had to rely on the strength of their community to survive. Incidentally, I’ve thought a lot about this because I’ve just started reading Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, and I read a ProPublica article earlier this year called “Separated by Design: How Some of America’s Richest Towns Fight Affordable Housing.” They depict different versions of housing struggles—Eviction chronicles the consequences of an endless cycle of poverty and evictions, and the ProPublica article goes behind-the-scenes of the drastic wealth disparity of a Connecticut suburb—but they tell the same story. Housing has always been regarded as a privilege and not a human right, and there exist systematic inequalities that elevate the already rich and keep the disadvantaged poor. It’s a terrible system, and it’s crazy to think that although we think of redlining as archaic, it most certainly still exists today.

We tour an old Chinese grocery store, which my mom and her brothers adored, because they’d grown up working in one. They excitedly point out all of the canned goods and snacks and sweets that they’d eaten as children. The tour guide informed us that back in the day, lots of Chinese store owners would have lines of credit for local families that had to wait for payday to afford their goods.

We got to explore the hotel attached to the museum, a place rented out specifically to Asian immigrants living and working alone, who were excluded from Seattle housing laws. Wing Luke, the Chinese-American man for whom the museum is named (but who I’d never heard of), was a trailblazer for Asian-American representation and minority rights. He was the son of a laundryman and grocer, earned a law degree from the University of Washington and a Bronze Star Medal for his service in WWII, and was appointed Assistant Attorney General for Washington state. He went on to make history as the first person of color on the Seattle City Council and the first Asian-American elected to public office in the Pacific Northwest; he played a key role in advocating for the City Council passage of the open housing ordinance, which led to the creation of the Seattle Human Rights Commission.

The Bruce Lee exhibit was last. We always joke that young Uncle Glenn resembled a young Bruce Lee, so we made him take a picture with his poster at the door. I didn’t know much about his life, but he was so iconic and it was cool to see him memorialized as such. He didn’t get the credit he deserved when he was alive, but his legacy is one of international superstardom.

I thought Seattle was a strange choice for the exhibit, but as it turns out, he spent a lot of time there, met his wife there, and much of his lasting poetry is inspired by Lake Washington. His grave is one of the most-visited in Seattle; people come from all over the world to pay their respects.

day 9: seattle, washington

We go to brunch at a family friend’s house, and then to the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation Discovery Center. We learned about a lot of really cool initiatives, like the foundation’s efforts to eradicate malaria, foster agricultural development, and provide clean water to third-world countries. I particularly liked the paper pharmacy machine, which can manufacture low-cost drugs at home, and the piece of trivia that people in other countries often refused mosquito nets because they were white, the color of death shrouds, and the foundation had to adapt.

But it all feels a little bit like propaganda, when you consider that people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos could single-handedly end to world hunger (and Gates just surpassed Bezos as the world’s richest man), while, in 2017, 22% of families in America alone were food insecure (approximately 28.6 million families).

Of course we know they have absurd amount of money. But as none of us have ever seen a billion dollars, we often forget how enormous the scale is between a million and a billion is. My dad used to say, “If I gave you a million dollars and told you to spend one dollar a day, you’d come back in thousands of years (2,739 years, to be exact), but if I gave you a billion dollars and told you to spend one dollar a day, you’d never come back.” As the website Spend Bill Gates’ Money points out, Bill Gates could buy the entire NFL and half of the NBA and still have $800 million left.

Twitter user @_Floodlight wrote:

If you worked every single day, making $5000/day, from the time Columbus sailed to America, to the time you are reading this tweet, you would still not be a billionaire, and you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week. No one works for a billion dollars.

Another Twitter user @CoreyDehMan expanded upon it in a thread:

So I was inspired by this tweet, and I wanted to see exactly how far back in history you would have to go to reach Jeff Bezos' Worth (for this tweet, about $108 billion dollars) (Thread)
So my first extension of this was, well, how about the freaking beginning of humanity? Let's say 10000 bc, or 12019 years ago? That's gotta get close to Bezos, right? Nope.
$5000 a day, every day. In a year, that reaches $1,825,000. In 527 years (Columbus—now), that reaches $961,775,000. Not even a Billion dollars yet.
So, extending this to the beginning of mankind. $5000 a day, every day, for 12,019 years. If you do that, you reach $21 BILLION DOLLARS. About ONE FIFTH of Jeff Bezos’ worth.
So, to finish this up. To reach Jeff Bezos’ worth of $108 billion. You’d need to earn $25,000 a day. Every day. From the beginning of mankind to now (a total of 12,019 years). And you'd only pass him by $1 billion dollars. Eat the rich.

A lot of people argue that they earned their wealth, but the numbers say that no matter how hard you work, it’s just not possible. Outliers says that people like Bill Gates are, yes, smart and capable and resourceful and hard-working—but it’s because of their cultural legacy and the unique opportunities they were afforded that allowed those qualities to work for them. It’s significantly harder to support the idea of a capitalistic society and to praise the philanthropic efforts of billionaires when you start to understand that the American Dream is essentially a lie.

After that, we go to Pike Place Market in search of clam chowder, but to my dismay, the one famous place recommended to us is closed for the day. So I settle for some salmon and chips, which is delicious. We admire all of the vacant-eyed dead fish and watch the fishermen toss them back and forth.

When we go to the Gum Wall after lunch, I avoid it at all costs; it makes me involuntarily shiver. I honestly can’t believe I got that close to it last time. It’s possible that my OCD has worsened, because even being near it makes me feel as though I am coated in germs. This time, I’m fascinated by the graffiti wall, which is plastered with both pro-Hong Kong and pro-China notes scrawled on Post-Its. It’s like a tiny, insulated portrait of the world, in real-time. It’s not like anyone who sees it has the power to solve the democratic crisis. It’s just putting emotions out into the universe in the plainest form we know how; messages of support, messages of protest, messages of hope. It’s unexpectedly poetic.

We end the night walking through the quiet streets of Seattle, hanging out at the hotel, and watching the city slowly switch on from the hotel windows.

And then, just like that, another family vacation in the books. Exhausting but fun, as always. This one felt nice and slow; less active than our previous vacations when we’d walk miles and miles in the torturous summer heat (like Pompeii...and Beijing). It felt like an actual vacation from the frenetic perpetual motion of the city; a glacial pace, you might say. I’m grateful that wherever we are, that our family can get together for things like this, and that my grandparents are still able to do things like walk around a glacier. They’ve already booked next year’s vacation—Italy and Spain. Stay tuned!