Random thoughts from the sea
Day 21, Grand Asia 2018 Sunday, Oct. 21, 2018, Fukuoka, Japan: With our stop today in Fukuoka, we have visited the four main islands of Japan. Later we will go to the fifth, Okinawa. Fukuoka is known for its food. In 2014, Condé Nast Magazine named it Japan’s Next Great
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Day 20, Grand Asia 2018 Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018, Kochi, Japan: The Japanese coast is dotted with port cities of various sizes. This island nation of mountainous terrain is most easily traversed by water, especially for commercial shipping. A few cities are well known to Americans — Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka,
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Day 19, Grand Asia 2018 Friday, Oct. 19, 2018, Kobe, Japan: There was a time when I wouldn’t eat a meal ashore while on a cruise. After all, I had “paid” for my meals on the ship, and they generally are very good. Today I not only ate ashore, but
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Day 18, Grand Asia 2018 Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018, Shimizu, Japan: I’ll start at the end. Leaving Shimizu was our best sail away ever. A large crowd gathered on the pier and for at least 15 minutes elementary-school children entertained us with song and dance. It was a like halftime
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Day 17, Grand Asia 2018 Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018, Yokohama, Japan: I liked the nearby town of Kamakura so much last year that I signed up for a tour to go back. It’s a nice alternative to the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and is less than an hour from
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Day 16, Grand Asia 2018 Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018, Yokohama, Japan: I had debated about whether to take a tour to Tokyo today. My strongest memories of last year’s visit there are of rain. I felt like somehow I had missed seeing the Tokyo I expected to see. But the
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Day 14, Grand Asia 2018 Sunday, Oct. 14, 2018, Kushiro, Japan: For the second year in a row, the fog escorted us into Kushiro. It isn’t known as “the town of mist” for no reason. As we neared the port, a fog bank hung just off the balcony. From the
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Day 11, Grand Asia 2018 Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia: If Alaska’s Aleutian Islands are perfect pictures of snowy mountains and rugged coastlines, Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is similarly beautiful. Perhaps their breath-taking beauty is no surprise. Both are along the edges of tectonic plates of the earth, the northern
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Day 10, Grand Asia 2018 Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018, At Sea: I went to bed Monday night and woke up on Wednesday. No, I wasn’t exhausted from being pampered by the wonderful Holland America staff. We crossed the International Date Line during the night. (I may have written about this
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Day 9, Grand Asia 2018 Monday, Oct. 8, 2018, At Sea: Many of my friends think the many sea days on a long cruise would be a showstopper. What will you do just sitting there on a ship all day? Our day ashore in Dutch Harbor last week interrupted a
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