A Week in Cranchorage

I have been in Anchorage just about one week now. I am working for the National Park Service Regional Office downtown. So far in this one week I have already met some crazy folks and seen some ridiculous things. Here's a run down of my first week.

I got here at about 7:45 on Thursday night (May 28), the flights were pretty good considering I traveled like 5,000 miles on three flights for roughly 16 hours. The highlight was easily the lady I sat next to on the flight from Seattle to Anchorage. She began the flight by dropping an F bomb on the woman sitting in the aisle seat in the row in front of us because of trouble fitting her big ass suitcase in the overhead bin. My frustrated soon to be seatmate then turned to me looking for my approval of her swearing in the direction of a stranger. I smiled back at her because it seemed like the best solution considering I had to sit next to her for the next four hours.

I slept for the beginning of the flight and woke up when the aforementioned woman was ordering a cheeseburger and then rejecting the complimentary nuts by saying "I don't want that shit." She was a real joy. And it got better.

She proceeded to order a Crown Royal and Coke. At that point I thought that she was actually doing the right thing by getting some booze to take the edge off. She downed that round in about 5-7 minutes and then quickly ordered another. She couldn't fit all the Crown in the little airplane cup with her Coke so she just slammed the rest of the Whiskey, straight no chaser. Gotta love it.

After her third Crown and Coke she watched some terrible movie (Bride Wars) on a portable DVD player, but she was so crunkard at that point that she kept laughing obnoxiously loud and then recounting the plot at an equally inappropriate volume to her friend sitting next to her. The final straw came when she told me she was going to kill her husband for getting tickets that forced them to sit separately on the plane. Lady, if I had known which guy was your husband I would have gladly switched seats with him and let him deal with your absurdity. Hell I would have killed him at that point. She then mumbled that he was a "stupid f*ggot," and I turned my music up so loud that I am certain I will lose most of my hearing in my mid 30s. Thanks for the headphones, Mayme.

I survived the rest of the flight and checked into my hostel in downtown Anchorage around 8. I met up with the other intern from LC, Zeb, and me and him got a burger and a beer for dinner at some place right in the downtown area. Welcome to Alaska dinner will be $16 with tip.

The next morning I went and looked at a couple of apartments in this neighborhood called Fairview. It would be more aptly named Drunken-natives-with-missing-teeth-posting-up-on-the-block-Village. After I saw two apartments that despite their semi-sketch locations seemed appealing I walked to a sandwich shop to get lunch.

What happened next seems like a bad sitcom plot. I assure you it's not, but if you would like to pitch it to one of the networks I demand 10%. I walked in at the same time as this guy in his mid-twenties with a big Hurley snowboarding backpack on, long hair, a trucker hat and a beard.
Seemed like my kind of dude so I talked with him while we ate our overpriced, mediocre sandwiches. His name is Nick and he is a freelance photographer who takes stock photos that he sells to Getty Images. He was in Anchorage doing an outdoor photo shoot with some local would-be model. Nicholas J Reid is the guy in the picture below. Turns out he has a cousin at LC, that guy Evan who got his finger bit off by a barracuda in Cuba. I don't know Evan, but I know the legend so we had some connection there.

Eventually he told me that I am one of the better looking guys he has seen and Anchorage and offered me $300 to be his male model for the photo shoot. I am totally terrified at this point and want lunch to end immediately. I give him my number and tell him I'll think about it and to give me a call later that night.

I was pretty creeped out so I called Andrew (Sas) and asked him if I should do it. He basically laughed and told me to go for it because $300 is a lot of money to make in one day even if its a very uncomfortable one. So when he called I agreed to do it and set up a time to meet the following morning. Literally 3 minutes later I met my second bizarre dude of my first afternoon in Anchorage.

I went into this bike rental shop to try and rent a bike for the summer. In less than 10 minutes the bike shop guy, Pete, was offering me a room in his house for the summer. I had barely met the dude and he was all ready to be roomies. I needed a place to live real bad so I listened to his offer. Despite the creepiness it was a good deal. Fully furnished place with a hi-def tv and DVR and access to a whole bunch of bikes. I was a little to creeped out to really pursue the offer, but I will admit that I thought about it. Pete turned out to be a real nice dude, but seeing as he is in his late 40s and was offering a young lad such as myself a chance to sleep in his house after 10 minutes of chit chat I can safely say that he is a bit strange in his own right. He ended up renting me a bike that normally costs $32/day for $30 for the three days I had it. It was a great deal and he has recognized me every time I have been back in there for bike advice since then. A weirdo, but a friendly guy so I can't complain.

Later that night I went to a bar to watch the Lakers-Nuggets Game 6. I was in the bar all alone which is never a good idea and the only person I had a real conversation with was this extremely drunk hobo type named Lance. He could easily fit in in the Fairview neigborhood that I mentioned before. And when other young people saw me talking to this guy I got some seriously strange looks.

I went to sleep at about 10 after an exhausting day of bizarre occurances. Needless to say at 10pm it's still bright as shit here. Here's a photo I took on my ride back to the hostel. It looks darker than it felt like, but if you close your eyes everything is black so I managed.

The next morning I woke up got some coffee and Nick picked me up for the photo shoot excursion. It was a less awkward drive than I thought and we ended up at his cousins house in Wasilla about 2 miles from Sarah Pallin's house. I could not see Russia although I tried pretty fucking hard all afternoon to catch a glimpse of Putin rearing his head in our airspace.

Chantal was the name of the 19 year old girl model. She was not the outdoorsy type and could barely hang on our 7 mile hike. By the end she looked like she was coming down from base camp 2 on Everest. That is a picture of her below with some awesome mountains in the background. The hike was called the Mint Glacier Trail. It was supposed to be 18 miles round trip, but we didn't have the time nor the personnel to really pull off that epic of a journey. And the photo shoot part of it wasn't that bad. We just had to walk back and forth on the trail looking intense and then do it again smiling and then looking at each other and then looking at the mountains. It was worth the $300 any day of the week. And the picture of Chantal down there is not all that flattering, she wasn't that ugly, but if you saw her on the street you wouldn't immediately think "Holy Shit model chick."
After the photo shoot I went out with Nick and his cousin from Wasilla named Blane. We went out to the "classiest strip club in Anchorage." Classiest in Anchorage is not the same type of class you might expect in say anywhere else in America, but it wasn't that bad and Nick bought me a dinner before hand and a few rounds of Heineken's once we were at the club.

I got back to the hostel that night at 2:15. And it was dark out! Yes that's right, I saw darkness in Anchorage. It really doesn't get that dark, but I can confidently say that the sun did set. But when I got back to the hostel my key card didn't work and there was no one at the desk so I had no choice but to sleep on a couch in all my clothes downstairs in the lounge. Luckily I met this other guest who gave me a blanket, so it was manageable, but not exactly worth the $25 I had paid for a bed. I woke up at about 6 and went up to the front desk to demand my money back. They wouldn't give me a refund but they apologized and agreed to store all my stuff for free indefinitely while I continued my hunt for an apartment.

On Sunday I damn near signed a lease on this tiny little box of an apartment. Actually I did sign a lease, but I didn't put down the deposit so I was able to snake my way out of it Monday morning when my first choice for an apartment came around. If I had got the phone call 10 minutes later I would have been living in a little shack with really nice hard wood floors and nice appliances, but luckily this slightly older furnished apartment came through. Here are some pics.The apartment came with two couches, a little dinner table, a coffee table, a queen size bed and two lamps. Pretty good deal considering what I almost ended up with. Thank you Norseman Apartments you are so good to me. So good I almost forget all the missing tooth drunks roaming the block just outside my window. Interestingly there are some nice semi-suburban homes right across the way and they don't seem to go to near to those properties. They must know better. But today alone I did see two people get arrested in broad daylight. Ok, it's always broad day light, but it makes it sound sketchier.

So after I got my apartment I bought a bike from this old couple. It's a great little cruiser and the perfect mode of transportation for this city. It's not near as bike friendly as Portland, but still a bike is a great way to get around here and there are enough bike paths and a few bike lanes that is a way manageable. Also there are only a few really fast moving streets and you can avoid those so its a pretty nice way to navigate the city.
The old couple was WAY Canadian and delivered the bike right to the door of my apartment for $80. They were very interested in what I was doing for the summer in Anchorage and why I didn't have a car. The old guy was definitely sad to see his bike go and kept telling me how nice the bike was and how he used to ride it when his legs were better. So after 5 days I had a place to stay and way to get around. If you had asked me on day 2 if I thought I had any chance of being that lucky I probably would have said, "No, but I do have a great chance of becoming a successful outdoor life model." But really I was not too optimistic when I first got here and was a little scared at what the summer was going to end up like for me. Now I am settled in and feeling like I could enjoy myself here. It would be nice to know a few more people, but I am managing and starting to like living by myself. Tomorrow I will share stories from my first two days of work and also some more pics from around Anchorage and my office. There is always more to tell but for now I'll call this post finished. Or as they say in my neighborhood, "Beer and crank!"