Thursday, October 06, 2005
California
I am having a great time in CA. Yesterday we went on an amazing tugboat ride yesterday and saw these huge container ships, each carrying 2000-3000 of the containers that go on the back of tractor-trailer trucks. This morning we took a sail on a gaff-rigged "schow" ship in the SF bay, which was beautiful. A few days ago we went on a whale watch and followed a mother and calf humpback whale around, which was really neat; we saw the mother's tail (flukes) a few times. But when they exhale, the wind blows it towards you and it smells really bad, because it's coming from the decomposing krill in their stomachs.
We also went to Cannery Row and the Monterey Aquarium, which is just about the neatest thing ever. Cannery Row is getting more touristy, but they actually kept Steinbeck's closest friend's house exactly the way it was, not open to the public, and the lab in the basement still has some bottles that he labeled himself.
We walked around SF today, and it's amazing how much of the city is built on fill -- junk that people threw in the bay to extend the land -- rather than land that was formed geographically. We are seeing and learning about a lot of science, in addition to all that we are learning about history, literature, and policy, and yesterday we drove up to a hill overlooking SF bay and the Golden Gate bridge, and saw not only a spectacular view -- a beautiful sunny day, rather than the more common dense fog -- but one of the world's only "ophiolites," where subducting continental crust is forced up onto the plate that the rest of the subducting plate is going under.
Driving in the vans is a lot of fun; the five vans communicate via walkie-talkies, and they joke with each other, as well as pointing out things that we should look at by the side of the road and explaining them to us. We have between three and six lectures a day by the various professors.
There are wild parrots in SF.
Today I got my sundae that Jim promised when we found the crabs a while ago. We went to the original Ghirardelli's, and I had a great sundae.
Signing off.
We also went to Cannery Row and the Monterey Aquarium, which is just about the neatest thing ever. Cannery Row is getting more touristy, but they actually kept Steinbeck's closest friend's house exactly the way it was, not open to the public, and the lab in the basement still has some bottles that he labeled himself.
We walked around SF today, and it's amazing how much of the city is built on fill -- junk that people threw in the bay to extend the land -- rather than land that was formed geographically. We are seeing and learning about a lot of science, in addition to all that we are learning about history, literature, and policy, and yesterday we drove up to a hill overlooking SF bay and the Golden Gate bridge, and saw not only a spectacular view -- a beautiful sunny day, rather than the more common dense fog -- but one of the world's only "ophiolites," where subducting continental crust is forced up onto the plate that the rest of the subducting plate is going under.
Driving in the vans is a lot of fun; the five vans communicate via walkie-talkies, and they joke with each other, as well as pointing out things that we should look at by the side of the road and explaining them to us. We have between three and six lectures a day by the various professors.
There are wild parrots in SF.
Today I got my sundae that Jim promised when we found the crabs a while ago. We went to the original Ghirardelli's, and I had a great sundae.
Signing off.
