Anchorage! (?)

I got into Anchorage at about 12:45 this afternoon.  It's about a 6 hour flight from Chicago (plus another hour and a half from New York), but the last 2 hours of the flight have incredible views (pictures later) if there isn't too much cloud cover.  After waking up at 4 AM (Eastern) to catch an early flight, I can't put a coherent post together right now.  So here are a few observations.

• It doesn't feel like a city at all.  Maybe that's because I'm coming from New York, but outside of maybe a 4x2 block section of downtown, there's tons of open space and buildings that look like they were just plopped down with no real thought.  I walked around for a good 3 hours in the afternoon and there really isn't any traffic to speak of outside of four main streets, one heading in each direction.
• There are food carts selling reindeer sausages.  I didn't see any sidewalk food at all outside of the three at the (official) tourist information center/federal building, so there's a good chance they're just gimmicks for visitors, but still.
• As an addendum to the last point, there are at least 4 tourist information centers in a 3 block stretch in one area.
• Anchorage is on the water, but the ocean is completely inaccessible.  The actual coastline is mud flats that vary from 100 to 200 yards in width.
• Of the passengers on the flight from Chicago to Anchorage, pretty much everyone fell into one of two categories.  Outside of the people who actually live in Alaska (an obvious minority), the flight was full of...let's just say "retired" couples heading up for cruises and young (more or less) men going to Alaska to work (hey, that's me!).
• It really hits you that you're in Alaska when you look at the departures/arrivals board at the airport and half the flights are to places like Nome, Ketchikan, Deadhorse, or Barrow.
• Other than the west side of the city which is open to the water, Anchorage is surrounded by high mountains.  And not the way Los Angeles is, where the mountains are on the horizon.  In Anchorage, they feel much closer and much higher.  One weird effect of this is that the cloud cover didn't seem to move at all.  It was overcast all day in the city, but you could always see daylight above the mountains.
• Bumper sticker of the day: "Canada's ass, it's Alaska's gas!"  There's a really obscure boundary dispute between the US and Canada in the Arctic Sea.  Both sides are claiming an area that's thought to have lots of natural gas reserves, and because we don't negotiate with terrorists and poutine eaters, we can't get a deal done (or something like that).  The fact that some Alaskans are angry enough about this to reduce their cars' resale value is amusing to me.  Plus I appreciate any irrational belligerence toward Canada.
• Tonight's sunset will occur at 10:46 PM.

Picture time!

The last two hours of the flight looked more or less like this.

Massive glacier not too far from Anchorage.

Looking east from a spot near the shore a bit south of downtown.

It's past 5:30 now and I haven't eaten since 11 AM, so it's time to find some dinner.  We'll see what Anchorage has to offer in the culinary realm, but I'm not holding out high hopes.

Grizzly Count: 0
Moose Count: 0