Travelling -- No Anthologies This Month

Greetings from the South Pacific and all that. [wave]

For anyone looking for the Anthology Listing, I'm afraid I'm skipping this month. I'm on a cruise ship a couple of days out from Tahiti; internet is unreliable, and when it works it costs thirty-eight cents per minute. I usually do several hours of research online before I post the month's listing, and much as I love you all, I'm not willing to spend a hundred bucks or more to do it. :/ When I get home, I'll have one (1) day to wash every garment I own before getting back on a plane to go to my mom's for Thanksgiving, at which point I'll be doing family stuff. I think November's going to be a wash for the listing. Everyone keep writing, and I'll see you in December.

I've been having a great time, doing lots of reading and lots of writing, and am sitting here with a truly spectacular sunburn, courtesy of Bora Bora. :) We went on a 4WD tour around the island and up three mountains. It was truly awesome, but the truck had no roof (which was one of the awesome parts, actually) and I got sizzled like whoa. My face has been peeling off my skull in small, dried-up bits, and the peeling part is working its way onto my scalp. I expect to have what'll look like an absolutely terminal case of dandruff by tomorrow at the latest. [rueful smile]

Tahiti's awesome; see it if you can. Bora Bora was particularly beautiful, and had great weather, sunburn notwithstanding. Samoa is lovely and has incredibly nice people, but the missionaries did a number on them like whoa, to the point where it's rather horrifying. (Samoa is very Christian, to the point where you're required to go to church on Sundays, and when one of the people on our tour asked the guide on American Samoa about their religious beliefs before the missionaries, she smiled and said, "We had no beliefs." O_O Note that American Samoa was the less uptight of the two stops; Apia was more conservative on the surface, but nobody asked any of the locals there within my hearing about their traditional beliefs. Now I kind of wish I had, for comparison. I'd like to think this one guide is just particularly well brainwashed, and not representative.)

Hawaii is... well, it's the US, and there you go. It's worth visiting, definitely, but don't expect it to feel terribly different, if you're an American. The Polynesian Cultural Center that everyone raves about is very expensive and very plasticly Disneyfied. Oh, and no one grows sugar cane commercially on Hawaii anymore, something I didn't know. The last crop was harvested in December of... either 2008 or 2010, I forget now, but just a few years ago.

We have our share of idiots on board, including one gentleman who was on a tour with us who seems to think all brown people speak Spanish. [headdesk] I've been wishing I could confiscate people's citizenship for a while now, because nobody who goes out to foreign countries representing the USA should be allowed to be that obnoxiously ignorant. Every cruise seems to have at least a handful of them, and it's damned embarassing.

I meant to do a stop-by-stop commentary, but that probably won't happen at this point. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer. I'm having a great time (and losing lots of weight, yay! being one of the few people on the planet who loses weight on cruises) but am looking forward to being back in my own bed.

Oh, and the internet on this ship has some kind of nanny software installed. :( Early on I was bounced off of several of the sites in my RSS reader because of "adult" content, and I've been pretty much ignoring the whole thing since. I'm not sure how tight it's set, and trying to read something means it's marked as "read" in my feed reader; I already have to just remember (with my awful memory) that I need to back up on a few blogs and comics, and I'd just as soon not mess up any more feeds, so I have 1000+ posts piled up with more coming in all the time. I'll try to get through them all, at least eyeballing post titles to see what's interesting, but if I haven't commented on your blog in a few weeks, that's why. [sigh] It's going to be a busy holiday season.

I hope everyone's been doing well, and writing well, and that everyone's safe and unflooded and not blown over. {{{}}}

Oh, and Washington now has gay marriage! :D Washington's voters rock; I'm very proud of the state I live in. I wish the rest of the country would get with the 21st century.

Missing you all,

Angie