Exploring Anchorage a little

Yesterday was a day of getting settled in a little.  No new photographs to post.  I met with my new manager and was shown where I'll be working.  It'll be weird going back to printing after being a service engineer for so long but the group seems really nice. It should be interesting.  I got my parking pass set up and then it was off to explore the city a little.

The suite the university put us up in is very nice but I'm anxious to find a permanent place.  We called six places that looked nice but had to leave messages.  This is very frustrating.  I wanted to go check them out over the weekend.  Try again on Monday.

We made the trip downtown. The city is very small actually.  It just has a lot of people in it.  It might be Binghamton size.  We found a bank to exchange our Canadian money.  They would only take the paper currency but not the dollar/two dollar coins.  We drove downtown, which is only 15 minutes in traffic from the university, and found a place to park. Walking up 5th Avenue we passed some taller buildings but most are shorter due to being in an earthquake zone.  A couple of walkways bridge the street linking buildings to parking garages but it definitely was much smaller a city than Seattle. We had come downtown as I was told by Elizabeth, the Conferencing and Residential Coordinator, that they have an event called First Friday.  Every Friday of the month the art gallery's stay open late and have food.  We wandered through a few of the art galleries looking at the local Alaskan art for sale.  They had sculptures to photographs to paintings for sale.  All very expensive so we just window shopped but it was fun.  My favorite Alaskan artist, Jon Vanzyle, had a whole room dedicated to his work at one gallery.  I have a print of his I bought in Homer last summer but the ones displayed in Anchorage were original prints and out of my price range.  Vanzyle is the official artist of the Iditerod Dog Sled race and produces the artwork for the posters every year for the race.

While leaving the downtown area, we found one of the malls.  It's in the middle of downtown and instead of being a large sprawling building it's several stories tall spanning several blocks.  Walkways above the street link the buildings together.  I have never seen a mall like that.

This afternoon it's supposed to be nice and a trip to Kincaid Park to walk the beach a little is planned.  Hopefully the weather turns out nice.  It's been cloudy and rainy here since we arrived.  Normal for this time of year although usually there's snow on the ground by now.  Have to check the weather once the sun comes up.  It's usually around 10:00am this time of year before it does.  It's hard to judge waking up when it's dark in the morning.