Hunkered down in Anchorage

Sitting in a bar in Freemont, Seattle watching  Chelsea and Liverpool is a very different experience from being in Anchorage after a 24 inch snowfall. Yesterday  Alan and I were in the same bar when Manchester United beat Barcelona. You can watch the hundreds of fans celebrating the victory on Youtube: Shirt of the Villa. As I write, Drogba has just netted for Chelsea and one fifth of the bar goes wild; the other 80% stand and sit in silence waiting. I think it's probably wise to put my Mac away in case any beer starts to spill. What is amazing about this bar is that for the last 2 days hundreds of supporters of English football teams have been coming here to watch the games, I don't know why. On the left you can see a woman from China who is a Chelsea fan; on the right some Manchester fans.

Alaska is strange. First there are Christmas trees in all the shops even though it is nearly May.  Second it is the land of the midnight sun: it just won't go dark even at 1030 at night. Third, you can have 24 inches of snow in one day, the biggest earthquake in the whole of America in 1964 and

 nobody bothers but if the Darwin's Theory doesn't open at 1000 then there is trouble. Our tour guide, a 39 -year-old single Alaskan woman describes why she is still single even though men  outnumber women by 2 to 1 : the odds are good but the goods are odd. Alaska is also beautiful. We do a sea-trip from Seward and see Puffins, Sea lions, Eagles and Whales - not bad for a 4 hour voyage. Then it's off for the flight to Washington state.

Seattle is a great city: one of my top 5 ever. It is beautiful, it has character and it is fun. What other city would put a massive troll

 under its main bridge? All great cities have a water presence and 

Seattle has it everywhere. Not many cities have an underground city running in  parallel but Seattle does. You can see what was left of one of the bathrooms on the left. the underground city tour is really worth doing.  I love this place. It has a Bolshevik statue of Lenin in Freemont - the heart of its entrepreneurial district. It also has a Science Fiction Museum, a music centre which was featuring Jimi Hendrix and an IMAX cinema screen which was showing Shine a Light, the Scorcese biopic of The Rolling Stones.

We have now hired a car and are on our way from Seattle to San Diego - first stop Long Beach.

Reading Bill Bryson's Shakespeare

On iPod Love

Published Shirt of the Villa USA