I had a blast on Thursday in Los Angeles because my friend Alex came to pick me up from the port and drove me around in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. It was fantastic!!!! Lots of beautiful houses, lots of palm trees… but mostly, lots of traffic…

I had only a couple of hours to walk around San Francisco but I loved the place. The first deli I ran into was an organic one and I got some nice things from there for breakfast! I managed to get just close enough to the bridge to get this picture and then I had to go back to the ship and work.

… Beautiful Pelican flighing patterns …

This one is for my grandparents, Manou and Badou!

Our beautiful ship, docked.

I went to the top of this column…

And here was the view from up there!

I especially loved the various shades of blue of the sea… amazing view!

Yesterday I got to explore the city of Astoria…

Alaska is done and over with now, and we are slowly going down South with the ship.

Here is a quick picture I took from deck 6: this is all I could see of Vancouver on Sunday as I was unable to leave the ship (work work work!)

A very sunny day in Prince Rupert last Thursday

Yesterday I had what is called a “wet drill” - a safety training during which you put in practice all you have learned about life rafts in case we had to abandon ship for real.

For the one and only time during the whole of this trip, I was allowed to go in the ship s swimming pool along with my fellow classmates!

I was obviously not able to do the class AND take pictures, but the staff captain who was passing by was kind enough to stay with us for most of the class and picked up my camera for us and took all of these amazing photographs!

The correct way to jump into the water with your life jacket on: feet together, pushing down on your life jacket with your arms so that it doesn’t hit your head when reaching the water.

Survival technic if many people are in the water without access to a life boat or life raft: chain together for warmth and to be more visible for rescuers. It also helps with moral not to be alone, which is the most important factor for survival.

Here is us inside the life raft. The boat has 16 life boats, where all the passengers and some crew will go to. Most of the rest of us crew are assigned to life rafts just like this one (the boat has 64 of them). They are inflatable and designed to hold 15 people.

Next was the hardest part of the training, learning to board a life raft that is the wrong way up. We first must climb on top and then turn it upside down, putting yourself underneath the raft. Then you need to swim out from underneath the raft of course! But climbing on top of this thing with the lifejacket on was probably the hardest part. I don’t want to think of how hard it would be in the middle of the stormy ocean!

Here is me, ready to let myself fall underneath the raft so as to turn it right side up.

I loved the training but it has really put it into perspective that this kind of catastrophe can happen on my ship, and I almost wish we had more intensive training… However I know that the training I did receive will help me a lot to help myself and others if anything of that kind was to happen.

Skagway historic train…

Rails…

Oups… I might be in trouble here!

Downtown Skagway looks a lot like a Western movie set…

What I saw early this morning when getting off the ship to get some train pictures…

On Wednesday, both the Norwegian Sun and the Norwegian Star are parked together in the port!

Alaska I-pod commercial

As you can see Ketchikan, Alaska is very proud of its drinking industry. Sorry, of its fishing industry.

Here is one of the lifeboats of The Sun as we learned how to lower it on to deck 6, so that we could board it and learn about how to survive inside it.

Here is the inside of the lifeboat, with room for 150 people. It also countains water, food, fishing gear, medical kits as well as many types of distress signals so that the people in there hopefully don’t have to survive in there for too long!

Last week, a few minutes after I arrived in the photo gallery for work, I saw across the window the most beautiful rainbow I had ever seen. We were high at sea between Prince Rupert and Seattle. The weather had been stormy and the seas were rough, the boat was rocking a lot and things were sometimes falling from the desks. But there came a ray of light and all seven colors of the rainbow could be seen, moving alongside with us… and just as I was looking at this scene and telling my colleagues to look at how beautiful this was, I saw a whale…. It was swimming so close from the surface, and I could see the body, then the tail, the body then the tail… above it was a crowd of white birds, and around them the magnificent light that was still there even though the rainbow had gone. And then I realized it was not one whale I was seeing, but two… no three… no, four whales all swimming together in the light.

I have been in whale country for the past 6 weeks, but this was my first time seeing them, and that was a beautiful and fascinating sight. I understand that some people could spend a life time studying them…

No picture was taken, but the image will forever stay in my mind and in my heart.

Hello everyone,

I had to change the way comments are posted because I got invaded by spam in a way I could no longer handle it. I have such limited time now to take care of this web site… So from now on, if you want to post a comment, always email me and I will post it for you as quickly as I can.

Thanks!

A wild Alaskian bird seen on the side of the street…

This bald Eagle was kept in captivity because it was found injured and was no longer able to survive on its own…