Ice Ice Baby

Whoa, it’s been a while. The cruise portion is now over and now begins seven days of road tripping across Alaska.

So, an overview of the last few days…

I ate like a pig. Damn, I seriously inhaled food as if the world was going to end tomorrow and I decided on day one to throw my guilt overboard. Buffet breakfasts, long lunches and four course dinners every freaking night, ugh, pass the Tums.

Everybody was old, Japanese, or a combination thereof. There was a Japanese tour group on board and there were well over 300 of them. They were really nice though and many of the ladies wore kimonos on the formal nights which was really cool. Some of them started to talk to me in Japanese and I just stood there, blank stare and all, most of them figured out I’m not “one of them” lol. There weren’t many hot guys…Actually, the only ones that actually stood out was this tall swimmer looking guy and these Portuguese brothers who I saw everywhere I went. The older one (or at least I think he was the older one) was straight up hot as hell while the younger one was cute as anything, almost in the same way Southern Charm is boyish cute.

I did the teen program for the last time. Only about a dozen people showed up in total, (usually about 50 show up to give you an idea) but that let us become a pretty close group. They were mostly 15 or 14, only two were 16. Cool people though. There was no “Ben” for this cruise though. Given the really small size of the group we didn’t really follow our supposed daily “program” and we ended up just hanging out and playing Rock Band or swimming. On the second to last night we did karaoke and I sang “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC and “Tearin Up my Heart” by the Backstreet Boys, fuck, how did they now know I was gay lol. One thing I found really annoying though was that many of the guys kept saying “That’s so gay” or just using gay in all its inappropriate forms. I wanted to tell them off on so many occasions but I bit my tongue.

Alaska is actually rather boring, very pretty, but boring. It’s cold, rainy, mountainous and full of gift shops trying to sell you overpriced stuffed huskies and stuff like that. I mean, maybe if I were more outdoorsy and went legit hiking it would be pretty cool but I’m not that kind of guy…The sight of snow capped mountains in summer kinda freaks me out though, especially considering since I left DC, it hadn’t dropped below 90 degrees there. We did go see a bunch of glaciers and saw one “calf” a baby iceberg which is actually one of the coolest things I saw this whole trip.

Actually, this was one of the less memorable cruises I’ve been on but nevertheless, it was fun. Maybe I should stick to warm weather destinations.

Well, I’m back on land and am not paying 75 cents/min for the internet so hopefully I’ll catch up on all the missed posts, by the looks of it, I missed quite a lot. I did see that Jason Carwin has returned which is exciting for me and sure for many of you as well. He was actually one of the first blogs I followed and his blog was one of the things that had really helped my own coming out progress. So a belated “welcome back” to him.

After leaving the ship, we rented a SUV and set off driving. Today we did some exploring and we found a mall with an indoor ice skating rink, bowling alley and the biggest Forever 21 I’ve ever seen. It was department store big. Did anyone else know they had a men’s clothing section? We also found a weekend farmers market. There was an electric violinist performing there who played a bunch of pop music like “Speed of Sound” by Coldplay and “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. It sounds so different when performed in such an unconventional way but it was brilliant. We also found a stand selling South American food which was delicious beyond reason, never expected to find that up here.

Finally, update on the college front, I’ve pre-registered for my classes for next year but I’m not holding my breath when it comes to getting all the ones I’ve requested, even less so when it comes to the time slots I requested. That’s the thing that sucks about being a freshman, you always end up with the leftovers after the upperclassmen have had their fill. I also got my first bill for the first semester’s dues….oh man lol.

Okay, so this is getting really long and I apologize so as a way to thank you for your attention, I give you the gift of asking me anything you’d like to know about me, within reason of course. I’ll answer them in a future post.

All the best,

JP