Staying Cool in the Pool

Call me crazy, but with all the exciting things to do in the Bahamas, one of my favorite things to do was chill out in the pool. In some sense, it felt weird not to be taking advantage of the beach or the tropical setting, or anything but the fact that it was warm enough to be in the pool. Nevertheless, floating around, staring at the coconut trees and the wires holding them together was strangely peaceful and relaxing. Not so relaxing that I'm looking for a pool around here or anything. But relaxing enough that next vacation in the sun, I'm sure I'll grab an inner tube or a floating chair and head for the pool pretty early on.

Not Exactly a Cruise Ship

In a post from the Bahamas, I stated that I had heard a cruise ship coming in that morning. Boy was I wrong. As you can see from the picture, it was a US military ship. Well, you can't actually see the US flag, but trust me, it's there.

This picture is one of my favorites of the ones I took in the Bahamas. I like the contrast among the seagull in the foreground, the ship, and the construction at the monstrous Atlantis resort & casino in the background.

The Shoal

Wednesday night, after the snorkeling, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice meal out. We had been doing a lot of eating in the executive lounge and the cheap-o Imperial Cafeteria across the street from the hotel (perhaps worth of a separate entry). So we decided it was reasonable to spend a few bucks on something fancier. I looked through the guidebooks and came up with The Shoal Restaurant & Lounge. Somewhere I probably lost the "fancier" idea...

We went downstairs and got a taxi. When we got in, the driver asked where we wanted to go. Forgetting slightly, I asked to be taken to "Shoal's." This request confused him to no end. He kept asking the bellman at the hotel if he had ever heard of this restaurant. Finally, we checked the guidebook and mentioned that the restaurant was a few miles up Nassau Street. A light bulb appeared over his head and said, "Oh, you want to go to The Shoal. Not Souls." He kept repeating that the name of the restaurant was not "Souls" -- I guess my accent threw him.

Anyway, he was delighted that we wanted to get out of downtown to a non-touristy restaurant. After we established that the fare would be $10 (approximately what I figured it should be if metered -- but no taxi driver ever turned the meter on for us), he started giving us a tour of the "Over The Hill" neighborhood. Several guidebooks had warned us against this neighborhood, and our driver in fact referred to it as the "ghetto". Christina remarked that it was the nicest ghetto she'd ever seen. There are places near our house (that I'd feel comfortable driving to) that aren't as nice as this neighborhood.

When we got to the restaurant, the driver gave us his card and said to call him when we needed a ride back. I tried to pay him the fare, but he said we could just pay him on the way back. That was remarkably friendly and trusting and set a good tone for the evening.

At the restaurant, we had what was probably the best meal of the trip. After having a salad (me) or soup (Christina), we enjoyed some delicious grouper (me) or snapper (Christina). We finished off with way too much guava duff, which we couldn't finish. During the meal, the manager (the owner?) kept coming over and giving us information about the Bahamas. He explained, for example, that Bahamians have the same last names as Americans because they are largely are descended from Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution...and their slaves. He further expressed optimism that things were only going to get better in the coming months, because they were due to replace the government in an election. I'll watch for the results with some interest.

Once our meal was over, our driver was waiting for us. He took the pictures displayed in this entry, in fact. On our drive back to the hotel, he explained that he normally doesn't work this late, so he went across the street to a bar and had a beer. (As Christina pointed out, at least he said '''a''' beer.) Thus ended our one venture into a local neighborhood and one of the high points of our trip.

Snorkeling, both with and without sharks

Well, we got the photos developed from the waterproof cameras, which I believe we didn't do when we did the snorkeling with sharks in La Jolla two years ago.



Last Tuesday afternoon, we went on a snorkel excursion with Stuart Cove's.

They took us out on a boat around New Providence Island to two sites where we swam around and looked at pretty fish through our snorkel masks.


The third site was somewhat different. The boat first lowered shark bait (some sort of raw meat -- no, not the snorkelers). Then some of us jumped in the water and did not swim around -- that's one of the things they told us not to do. Also on the no-no list -- petting the sharks. How silly do they think we are?


Pretty silly, I guess. I was planning to hold onto the rope line to prevent drifting, but my fellow snorkelers (a lot of spring breakers among them) engaged in so much thrashing and giggling that I paddled a short distance away to watch. Fortunately, the sharks seemed equally intent on keeping their distance.

These were Caribbean reef sharks, which were somewhat bigger than the types of sharks we saw in La Jolla. It was a neat experience seeing them up close, but a few minutes of it was quite enough.

Police Band

One of the serendipitous sights we saw in the Bahamas was the Royal Bahamas Police Force Band. The band is quite a big deal...they're on the back of the $1 bill. We were enjoying the Hilton's executive lounge (one of its best features) when we heard music coming from outside. We looked out from the balcony and saw the band marching away. A hotel employee later told us that a group had hired the band to escort them to dinner -- he implied that a lot of money had been involved.

More Bahamas Pix

Here's me in front of the "Queen's Staircase", Christina in front of Parliament, and one of Nassau's newer tourist attractions...

First Pictures from the Bahamas

Here is our first set of pictures from the Bahamas. Many of our pictures are on the waterproof camera, so we'll wait until we get back and get them developed. But here are a few pictures from Sunday and Monday.

The first picture shows the view from our hotel room. Unfortunately, the largest coconut tree on the property is right in front of our window. Still, you can sort of see the pool and the Hilton's "private" beach. (All beaches are public, but the only access to this beach is via the Hilton property -- or the water.)

The second picture shows Christina on the beach, with one of the cruise ships in the background. The last two days there have been three in port. I'm not sure about today, but I heard one coming in this morning.

The third picture shows Christina shopping at Prince George Plaza. No, not that one.

And, finally, the fourth picture shows us sitting down after wandering the downtown area.

Greetings from Nassau

Hello from the sunny Bahamas. We've been here about 24 hours now and are enjoying ourselves. The Hilton is nice enough...unfortunately, there's a tobacco convention going on at the same time. The tobacconists are a bit rowdy and, well, they smoke a lot. We managed to avoid them at the Hilton's beach this morning. The water was a little bit cold today, so we floated around the pool for a little bit before lunch.

After a couple of fish burgers, we booked a couple of excursions for later in the week & then headed into the downtown area. The hotel is a couple of blocks away from where the cruise ships dock, so most of the shops cater to their passengers. Yesterday, a Carnival ship was in port -- today it was Disney. Fortunately, that made it easy to pick up a few souvenirs before stealing a glance at Fort Fincastle and the Queen's Staircase.

When we get back to the hotel, we'll probably go to the Cable Beach area for dinner. At some point, we'll get Internet access from the hotel and post some pix.

Gutters

Recently, we paid a significant amount of money to a local roofing company -- a good choice, since the alternative was a leaky roof. That sort of defeats the purpose of any other renovations.



As part of the work, we had them replace the old (leaky) copper gutters on the front of the house. As it turns out, that's the most visible part of the renovations. The old gutters were green (think Statue of Liberty); the new ones are shiny copper.




So it's funny -- after spending all of that money, the only visible benefit we get are the nice new gutters. Look at the roof -- can you tell where the slate was replaced?

GPS

I got a new GPS receiver as a gift from Christina for my recent birthday. I already had one, so at first this seemed like more of an upgrade than getting a shiny new toy.

Boy, was that an underestimate. It's amazing how much things have come along in the past 5 or so years. The color display on my new receiver alone makes a big difference.

But where it really shines (in my opinion) is the interactivity with my computer. I can get a map DVD (already on order) and load detailed maps onto the receiver. I can download the data from the receiver, edit and display it. I'm just starting to grasp all the various cool stuff that is possible with it.

Yesterday, we put the GPS to its first major road test with a drive out to West Virginia for Steve & Vanessa's Super Bowl party. You can see our route displayed here. (I really wish I had that feature during my 2005 cross-country drive.)



It was the first time we had been out to their new place, and we had a lot of fun. The Super Bowl stayed exciting at least through the beginning of the fourth quarter (they should always play it in bad weather), and it was fun to hang out with people. At the end of the evening, we just followed our GPS trail back out (minus a couple of wrong turns we made on the way in).

Flickr

EuroQuest IV, Saturday 19:27: Thurn & Taxis
Originally uploaded by Eric E Haas.

I have previously posted about my visit to Euroquest, a board gaming convention. I got into a discussion today about Flickr today, which prompted me to do a little searching, which turned up this photo. It's sort of scary to think of how many random pictures of me there might be on the web that I'm not aware of.

I'm attempting to post this from Flickr, so there's no telling how this will turn out.

Trivial Progress

So, inspired by my foray earlier this week and foiled by the Crofton Bowling Centre's decision to have a tournament today, I headed off for a semi-birthday-related outing with Ben, Martin, Paul and Rachel to Jasper's Crofton to play some more trivia.

In a blatant display of narcissism, I'm going to start (continue) to take pictures of my high scores and post them. As you can see, I had a pretty decent Countdown (#1 at Jaspers for January and #14 nationally for that game) and a #4 Wipeout. (Paul and Rachel got #3 locally on a later Countdown but tragically did not take a picture of the moment.)

NTN 2007

It's been a year since my last NTN update. At the time, I was #17 on Santa Fe Cafe's list of Players Plus Points. (Basically, most frequent players.) Well, Santa Fe dropped trivia, so I switched my home location to Joe Senser's Bloomington. I don't really have any location in Maryland I go to frequently, so this seemed as good as any other.

I'm #13 on their list, but with half as many points as #12 and half again as many as #14, I probably won't be moving soon -- no matter how (in)frequently I play.

Tonight I was at my "home" location and did fairly well at "Showdown" -- around #200 nationally, and the best scoring Joe Senser's has seen in the past 12 months...

Mistakes are always a poosibility

Christina spotted this on our local news...

Games People Play

I've updated (and renamed) my gaming page, partially motivated by a post Martin had about a new BoardGameGeek widget that lists your most recently played games. Looking at the page now, there's a mix of what I played last Friday & Saturday with friends (which explains the overlap with Martin's list), games I've played online and games my nephew roped me into playing at Thanksgiving. I'm missing some games on the list, but that's OK.

World Heritage: Year in Review

Looking at last year's update of five sites inspired me to take stock of this year's total.

Looks like it's five again!

1. In early April, I went to Cologne and saw the cathedral.
   
2. Later that month, Christina and I headed to New York and took in the Statue of Liberty.
   
3. In June, I traveled to Russia and saw St. Petersburg.
   
4. In September, we went to England. One World Heritage Site we saw was the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape.
   
5. Another was the Ironbridge Gorge.
   

For the second year in a row, Christina made it to a site I missed (which is only fair, given I made it to two she missed), Suzhou. If only I didn't have to go to these conferences...I wouldn't be traveling so much in the first place, I guess.

That brings me to 34 sites. Over 4%, finally! At this pace, I probably have a couple more years to go before I hit 5%.

Travelers' Century Club Update

I've been going through my old posts and tagging them with labels like "travel" and "go". In the process, I've come across a number of old posts I had forgotten about (and some with typos that had stayed there for years).

One of the old posts is one about the Travelers' Century Club, an organization of those who have visited 100 or more "countries". At the time, I was at 15 or 16, depending on how you count. Now I'm up to 22. New additions:

• China, People's Rep.
• France
  
• India
  
• Puerto Rico
• Russia
• Switzerland

Wow. Still not even close.

Now I'm 18K...and 1K...

Well, the American Go Association's new ratings are out, and my rating is finally up to 18 kyu! I was 10-7 in tourneys I entered as 19 kyu. I hope I can do well enough at my new ranking to earn another promotion. I was going to enter one last weekend, but the lack of a new ranking, combined with being exhausted after getting back from China with a cold, dampened my enthusiasm enough to keep me from going. My next tournament will either be the end of January (if I feel like driving down to Richmond) or the beginning of February.

In other news, I've earned Premier Executive 1K status on United Airlines. What is 1K status? Well, originally United only had two characters to signify status, so 1K=100K=100,000 miles. I like to think of 1K as "1 thousand hundred miles". So did I really fly 100,000 miles this year? That seems like a lot (around the world 4 times). Not really. United gives a minimum of 500 miles for each segment flown. That policy padded my stats a little, but the real bonus is the 150% credit for first and business class. (There was one penalty, where if you take a 1-stop, United only gives you credit for the direct routing. That cost me 70 miles.) I added everything up, and by the end of the year (after flying back from Arizona), I will have actually flown "only" 95,960 miles. The new status is, I think, what got Christina and me upgraded on our flight out here to Arizona, so it already seems to paying dividends.

Thursday in China

Click Here for the Photo Album

Careful readers will note the omission of "Wednesday in China". On Wednesday, Christina took the camera and headed to Suzhou for an excursion. A link to her pictures will follow.
Also, on yesterday's post, it came to my attention that some people were having trouble displaying the picture, which was hosted on a server in China. So I made a local copy.

On Thursday morning, I ducked out of a few of the conferences more skippable talks to head to Amy's Pearls with Christina. (Look here for a picture of Tony Blair looking particularly goofy visiting the shop.)

In the afternoon, after the conclusion of the conference, we went on a city tour for which we had signed up. The guide was better than the one we had on Tuesday. Still, I noticed a certain commercial theme to the tour.

First we went to the Jade Buddha Temple, which has two buddhas brought to Shanghai from Burma in the late nineteenth century. They are carved out of enormous pieces of rare white jade. We were told a story about how the priest who had transported them from Burma left them in Shanghai because they were too heavy to transport. Not too heavy to move from Burma, but too heavy to move to his final destination in China? That didn't make a lot of sense. After touring the temple, we were taken to the monk's tea room, where we learned about the restorative properties of Chinese tea, and then were given an opportunity to buy some.

Next up was a tour of the French Concession. Fortunately, we didn't repeat the tour of the shikumen from Sunday -- probably because one guy had spent too much time in the Jade Buddha Temple gift shop and we were running late. We walked around for a few minutes and then got back in the van.

The People's Square also got the walking around for a few minutes treatment, but at least we got a nice picture of ourselves in front of the Shanghai Museum.

Our final stop was the "Treasure Gallery". Here was an opportunity to "learn" about pearls and purchase them at higher prices than Amy's.

At the Conference in China

The organizers just posted pictures from the conference I attended in Shanghai. There I am talking with Scott, with whom I went to graduate school.