Day 12: FRIDAY

I miss Vladimir. I miss Mahajir. I miss Patrick and Leah.

Oh, and this train is haunted.

More on that later, though. I'll begin at the beginning, which was obscenely early this morning.

Due to a time change and disembarkation procedures, we had to be up at some ungodly hour this morning when my body thought it was supposed to be asleep. I had stayed up late the previous night to pack and fill out the requisite shipboard and customs forms, so I was pretty much ready (though rather loath) to go. I woke up a little before seven (which was five, by my internal clock), got dressed, threw my last few things in my computer bag and went down to meet everyone for breakfast. We had our carry-on bags with us, as well as the gorgeous red roses that Vladimir gave us the night of the midnight buffet (they made it through customs okay, and are currently traveling with us in a plastic water bottle wedged against the wall of the train compartment).

Because of our stateroom level, we had priority disembarkation, so we didn't have to wait long before we were called to exit the ship, go through immigration and customs and claim our luggage. We had said most of our farewells to Vladimir and the rest of our service staff the night before, since we knew we wouldn't see them before we disembarked. Patrick was manning the gangway, and we stopped and said goodbye to him, too. I had Jon take a photo, which I will post with the rest whenever we get the chance to dump all the photos onto the computers and sort them (some weeks from now, I suspect)...

We left the ship a little after 9 a.m., and our train wasn't scheduled to leave until 4:30 or so, which gave us another afternoon to play around Seattle. We spent a large part of it sitting in an outdoor park (it was actually installation artwork – a fountain and benches constructed from large chunks of pillow basalt, commemorating the Pleistocene era in the Pacific northwest – and no, I'm not making that up. Seattle is SUCH an artsy city. I'd absolutely love to live there if it didn't rain so much). The time we were not sitting in the park we spent across the intersection in Uwajimaya, one of the largest Asian markets in the country. It contains a full-sized grocery, a huge food court, a Kinokuniya bookstore, a gift shop, and more.

Yes, you may have noticed the danger here. I had a six-hour layover in a place with a Kinokuniya bookstore. Wheeeee!

Actually, I think I showed remarkable restraint (mostly due to the size of my carry-on bag). I bought only three Copic markers and two volumes of Matantei Loki, and I bought those only because Mag GARDEN won't license the first series for English-language distribution and I wanted to read them in order and have the full background for Matantei Loki Ragnarok. (I also flipped through some current periodicals, like the Japanese Playstation magazine. I found some new screenshots from Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus that I hadn't yet seen, although I'm sure they're all over the gaming sites by now. There's a great shot of Cloud and Kadaj, which is also a major spoiler. By the time the movie comes out this fall, nothing will be a surprise. We will have seen every stinking scene in the magazines and trailers!)

Of course, there was also the Asian grocery, where I bought, in addition to lunch and snacks, four bottles of Ramune and five boxes of Pocky (multiple varieties). Out of curiosity, Laura and I split a sweet red bean roll* from the bakery, and WOW. I have never tasted anything that sweet in my life – not even the super-lux cruise ship desserts I've been eating all week. It's like eating crystallized honey. As Laura (bouncing mid-air at the time) exclaimed, this certainly explains a lot about Gokuu's personality! What a sugar buzz.

Around 3:45 we headed back to King Station, and boarded the train around 45 minutes later. After the morning's hassles, we were looking forward to a chance to relax, sit back, perhaps stretch out and take a nap after the short night's sleep... Little did we know what awaited us, or we might have done our relaxing beforehand. /sigh/ Did I mention that the train is haunted?

The first and most troubling problem involved Laura and Jon's tickets. Through some mishap, they had tickets for July 4, not July 1, and so their compartment was double-booked. Since the sleeper cars were sold out, they were told that there was no place for them on the train. This meant that they had to either pay for another set of tickets and ride in coach, or get off the train and try to make their own arrangements to get home.

This was not helped by the fact that the surly conductor, Alexander, was doing everything in his power to complicate the problem. He confiscated their tickets and wouldn't even give them back so Laura and Jon could call a travel agent. (He *still* has the tickets; he didn't even give them stubs, which are their only proof that they paid for a sleeper, and they should have the stubs even if they'd used the tickets.) First he was going to put them off the train; then he offered to give them coach seats, to which they agreed. However, he took their original tickets and then informed them (after the train had already left the station) that by staying on the train, they had also agreed to forfeit the cost of their original sleeper tickets, as well as the two days' worth of meals and service that they'd paid for.

Laura didn't take that too well.

An hour later, after a number of phone calls, discussions, haggling, and MUCH frustration and hair-pulling, the word came down that the conductor, lo and behold, DID have a compartment open in the next car, and if they would pay an upgrade fee of $87, they could use it. (We're still trying to figure out what the “upgrade fee” was; Laura theorizes that it was the difference in fares between the rate at which they booked, and the more expensive rates charged at time of departure.)

Anyway, Jon paid the difference, and now they have a place to sleep. But I'm sure that Amtrak will be hearing about the trouble they went through, and the distinct lack of service on board. Especially from the conductor. (He was rude to us, too.)

That was the first of many small catastrophes. On the way west, we had a wonderful attendant named Patrick (no relation to the dancer) who anticipated our every need, and answered calls almost before we made them. Unfortunately, our sleeper car attendant on this trip, David, is not Patrick. He does not answer calls (we pulled the call button, waited ten minutes, watched him go by the room twice without responding, and finally gave up). The first thing we did when he introduced himself was ask him for a third bottle of water, since we had three people. He said, “Certainly. If you need more water, you can just let me know.” We still, as of 11:00 p.m., have only two bottles of water.

Not all of the trip's problems can be blamed on the train's staff, though. The downstairs toilets are also evil. One of them doesn't flush. Okay, I can understand a malfunction or mechanical failure; those things happen. However, toilets are NOT supposed to have an electric eye installed in the toilet bowl to have a high-powered fan blow on your backside every time the beam is broken. (That's our theory, anyway. There's certainly something weird going on with that one!)

Actually, all of the plumbing is kind of strange. We're in a more recent sleeper car than we were on the last trip, and these new sinks have push-button faucets, presumably for purposes of water conservation so you can't leave the water on too long. The problem with this is, they are not set to shut off right away... so you can push the button, lather and rinse your hands, walk to the other side of a room, get a cup, come back and fill it, and the water is still running. How is this conserving water, exactly?

Our biggest problem with water, though, has nothing to do with the plumbing. It has to do with Vladimir's roses. They're currently residing in a water bottle, the only convenient travel container that would hold three stemmed flowers. So far, they had traveled pretty well since leaving the stateroom, through breakfast on the ship (they made a nice centerpiece), through customs, in a taxi, on the luggage cart, through the train station, into the checked baggage room (yes, we checked the roses briefly while we ran around town) and then onto the train. When we got to our room, we put them in the table drink holder alongside the window The problem is, the roses are just a little top-heavy, and trains tend to go around corners... which means that the makeshift vase will randomly tip over, soaking the pants of whoever happens to be sitting next to it.

Mom was the first victim. Dad was the second. So far, I've managed to avoid the ire of the water bottle, mostly because I've been sitting in the chair on the other side of the compartment. (Although I did have a couple of things fall on my head from the luggage rack above my chair, so maybe it balances out.)

For the most part, I've been vegging since we got here. I spent the first hour or so reading Loki, and I think I'm actually doing pretty well with the translation (it's aimed at younger teenagers, so it's an easier reading level, and it has phonetic hiragana next to all the kanji I don't know). Then we went to dinner; it was New York Strip for me this time. Not bad – typical restaurant quality – but disappointing by comparison to what we've been eating all week. Plus, I really, really miss Vladimir. He would always tell me exactly what was good in the kitchen, and which items he thought I would like best. He would bring me extra entrees or desserts to sample if I couldn't make up my mind. He always knew exactly how I wanted my meat cooked. He would flit around behind our chairs and silently exchange the flatware. And he was just generally perfect, which is a really hard transition to make to a harried train waitress who doesn't know you and is trying to service eight tables at once.

After dinner, I brought what was left of my can of Pepsi and my Chocolate Bombe back to the compartment and started typing, which is where you find me now.

The dessert, at least, is good. It's almost like the cups of chocolate mousse that the waiters used to bring around after meals on deck 11...

* A soft bun stuffed with youkan, usually seen disappearing down the gullet of a ravenous anime character such as Usagi, Lirin, Son Gokuu or Miaka.